I’m Geelong based and a presenter for 94.7 The Pulse (I presented the Monday drive-show for 3 years). At one point they did want to take the frequency but were unsuccessful after public backlash years ago. The ABC News Geelong office is actually based in the same building. It’s a tiny tiny room which fits one or two journos into it.
If I was the ABC, I would be maintaining regional resources at the expense of metropolitan resources. I think the ABC’s ability to cover rural and regional areas is central to the service. Geelong has no TV news coverage other than the ABC.
All-in-all it’s a shocking decision by the government, along with the extinction of community TV.
According to the freeview guide they get all the ABC channels from NSW, live (ie. ABC News NSW at 6:30pm), while the commercials and SBS are the SA feeds in local/SA time.
Wouldn’t it be fair to say that Broken Hill associates itself far more with South Australia (the town runs on SA time, for example) than New South Wales in general?
Being an outback town that’s close to the NSW/SA border and largely isolated from the more populated Eastern half of NSW, I think locals would be mostly OK with having largely Adelaide/SA-based TV services (except around State Election/Budget time and the like) otherwise all services probably would’ve been switched to Sydney/NSW-based programming long ago.
I think you may be misinformed. I messaged the ABC Broken HIll facebook page and they confirmed that they currently, and always have, receive the NSW feed.
This supports the freeview guide which currently has all programs starting 30mins earlier than SA.
They may do now but historically it used to get ABS2 from Adelaide because of geography, and probably easier communication to Adelaide than Sydney, and Broken Hill being in CST.