The broadcasting laws didn’t allow regional areas to have more than 1 commercial channel. Aggregation allowed it from the late 1980s. Also technology had advanced enough that made it possible.
Just wondering - do the regional stations which have local branding eg. WIN, PRIME7, SCTV (until recently) now stay with local presentation 24 hours a day? When did the practice of switching to a dirty feed overnight cease?
I’m quite impressed by Daryl Somers’ production company actually going to the effort to put archival footage on YouTube. It’s not just Hey Hey its Saturday footage (which there’s plenty of) - but there’s also full episodes of Daryl Somers’ weekly variety show from 1982 & 1983 (there are many more available on the same channel). Here’s an example:
Today, 1985, SBS begins in Brisbane, Adelaide, Gold Coast, Newcastle and Wollongong. Broadcasting in all cities on the UHF band. (Canberra already had SBS on UHF 28, and in Sydney and Melbourne the VHF channel 0 transmissions were soon to be taken off… hence no mention of the Channel 0 frequency in the TV Week ad)
It’s interesting to note that SBS was transmitting on UHF 59 when it first started broadcasting into Wollongong & the Illawarra region. That frequency was later occupied by WIN when it started transmitting on UHF in 1988 (simulcasting on VHF 4 until it ceased transmission in 1990), prompting SBS to move to UHF 53.
I think there was a bit of reshuffling going on. I seem to recall that the Kings Cross signal in Sydney was Channel 54 initially but in this ad its shown as Channel 58
Would be good to see the 20 second Seven Color Television ident. I have a sound recording somewhere and will post if I can find it.
There were also 20 second idents for Seven Color Sport, Seven Color Movie and Seven Color Special. The movie ones survived the switch to the ATN logo in September and ran for many years, particularly The Midday Movie.
The font is custom.
The 5 second YouTube version is not an aired version and must have been an in-production version. Notice some of the numbers do not have the full stop after them, and the S’s were always animated, even in short stings.
I’ve been recording a lot of things to go through and try and build up a final collection but unless someone can give me a dummies guide to transcode with VLC from my Fetch box, I can only do screenshots. Certainly a lot more 7 content than SC now but there’s still been the “Always on ” animation, a couple of the tonight screens and a few random promos and CSA’s. One interesting thing though, I posted the first logo I’d seen on a Seven sponsored event in the Southern Cross Television thread. Tonight, that same ad came on but the Seven logo was completely gone, not even replaced with Southern Cross.
Not so sure about the last news tonight, something odd is with that. There’s been no further promotion of 7 News Tasmania since the initial FB post (which subsequently went to Twitter) and has now been removed and there was no mention on air of it at all tonight either. Will see what happens after midnight I guess and at 6pm tomorrow.