Channel 28 was already in use in Brisbane, Channels 30 and 33 were already in use at Currumbin. The lowest channel allocated to Mt Tamborine was 46. The use of higher UHF frequencies didn’t appear to be an issue for broadcasters.
Sadly I think NBN News be moved to Sydney at some point, and probably rebranded as Nine News, but really Nine should move production of all regional NSW bulletins up to Newcastle.
They could hopefully have a proper set, and NBN/Nine Newcastle could be hub that repackages capital city reports to be less capital city-centric, possibly by editing or revoicing them so references to “northern suburbs” and other such guff are excised. But that’s just a dream, probably not feasible in the tight financial environment of mass media today…
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The other reason why I think it makes more sense for NBN News to be in Sydney is if they are looking to sell NBN to SCA at any point.
Having only one regional licence out of 4 probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, unless they buy the 3 x SCA Nine stations of course.
And then they won’t be left with new studio premises in Newcastle that SCA may not want.
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I completely agree that all Regional NSW/ACT bulletins should be produced in Newcastle. It still wouldn’t be perfect, but at least viewers would be more likely to receive an appropriate “regional” perspective on the news than the current Sydney-centric view of events with irrelevant capital city stories and radio competitions, etc.
Realistically though, it wouldn’t overly surprise me if the production of NBN News is eventually moved to Sydney along with a rebrand as Nine News - surely the network would want to have a consistent brand at 6pm right up and down the East Coast rather than the “Pacific/New England Highway gap” that exists currently?
Yeah, it wouldn’t overly surprise me if the Nine Network affiliates in the four major regional aggregated markets of Queensland, Northern NSW, Southern NSW/ACT and Victoria + maybe NTD Darwin were to come under the same ownership banner (probably as “Nine Regional Television” or similar) at some point in the future.
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SCA inferred last year that they were open to offers for their television assets. It doesn’t seem like they want to buy more television stations.
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Honestly I do not know what is in the minds of the staff at NBN News. If history is any guide they have a resistance to follow the 9 news Sydney counterpart and I highly doubt we will see any changes anytime soon. That’s not to say change won’t happen but any changes seem unlikely to happen in the short term, more likely in the long term.
As for SCA buying NBN Television, that appears unlikely. I am not aware of any plans for SCA to buy channel 9 Darwin or imparja and that too seem unlikely to happen anytime soon.
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They nearly did. From memory it fell through at the last minute.
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Look at Nine’s results today. $100m in savings to be made. They simply have to move NBN News to Sydney. It makes financial sense.
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I don’t think NBN News has quite as much autonomy from the network as it did in the past though - look at how they adopted the current Nine News graphics (except with an NBN News logo, of course) on the same day as the rest of the network when in the past, NBN News ran their own race by having completely different On-Air Presentation to the Nine Network’s news services.
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I find it strange that they only adopted the graphics and not the theme music as well.
It should be “all or nothing”
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Can’t blame NBN News for wanting to keep their own theme music when the current version is about half as old as Nine’s though…
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Nine has already said they are targeting cricket, the ashes, one days and international programming (like all the expensive WB shows that do not rate that have gone over to 10Peach)
Running NBN News from North Sydney where real estate and salaries are significantly higher than Newcastle would not result In much if any savings.
NBN News is also the 4th most watched news they offer. After Melbourne Sydney and Brisbane. Some nights it even beats Brisbane.
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9 Newcastle (NBN) is a lot stronger station (a lot) in ratings than 9 Perth or 9 Adelaide which are by far the weakest stations.
Even when you strip out Gold Coast, NBN’s market is larger than Adelaide and just a tad smaller than Perth.
I don’t think Nine will be selling the station.
Yes, but as I understand it, there is more ad revenue in metro markets.
Ratings aren’t be the “be all and end all” of everything.
And everything is for sale at the right price!
But apart from perhaps SCA, I can’t see a logical buyer for NBN.
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Not to mention that (as it’s been said many times before) NBN’s viewers are spread across a much wider area than any metro market. It’s for that reason Nine quite understandably, pours more money into even their lower rating Adelaide & Perth services than they do with NBN News.
I can’t see the network continuing to treat Northern NSW as a special case for overly long into the future when they can probably save quite a lot of money (which could probably be better spent in other areas of the news/current affairs department) by streamlining it with the rest of Nine’s regional bulletins.
Agreed. Nine News Darwin (which if anything, is probably strategically more important than NBN since they need to have dedicated reporters for NT politics, etc.) was probably a top rating bulletin before 2017, but we all know what happened there.
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Ad revenue is C1000. That is advertisers pay a certain amount to reach every 1000 viewers. The rate in regional markets is a little less than metro markets. That is it costs less to reach 1000 viewers in Newcastle than it does Perth. But it’s about 15% less. And Newcastle’s ratings are more than 15% higher. So it’s safe to say the NNSW market brings in about the same revenue as the Perth market and probably more than Adelaide as Adelaide is a stagnant Population where as NNSW is Growing.
The revenues that NBN, STW and NWS bring in would be similar. However STW and NWS would have a News operating cost significantly higher than NBN - so in fact NBN could well be a more profitable station. Real estate and salaries in Perth and Adelaide higher too - but transmission costs for NBN higher. So in the end many things balance out and make the 3 stations more or less equal
What does “viewers spread out over a large geographic area” have to do with anything? Extra Transmisión costs for NBN would be offset by extra real estate, extra city salary and extra newsroom costs incurred by Perth and Adelaide. I think nbns news is already funded a fraction of other newsrooms.
Top rating yes! Top revenue? No. The Darwin market is tiny. 200k. Newcastle alone is 820k. NNSW with Gold Coast stripped out is bigger than Adelaide.
With high operating costs but tiny revenue streams Darwin News would have not been a a high margin business which is why Nine folded it into a state bulletin for QLD. On the other hand with massive revenue and smaller operating costs, NBN News would be a much higher margin business
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Well for a start, NBN News has to cover six individual sub-markets, some of which only have two or three reporters. The Gold Coast (presuming their reporters still do Nine/NBN as the case has been in the past) and Newcastle might have one or two more reporters to utilise than the other sub-markets, but even so NBN is likely to have fewer reporters/camera crews than 10 News First (well they seem to be the least resourced of the commercial stations) in any major metropolitan market.
Compare that to Nine News in the metropolitan markets - along with some general reporters the Sydney version (which is likely a typical example of Nine News in any metro market) has reporters who specifically focus on covering different types/genres of news stories - courts, crime, health, state politics, local fluff/puff pieces, sport. NBN doesn’t have anything like that because as the case is with just about all regional news services, their reporters generally have to cover a bit of everything.
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I would challenge that.
Consider that NBN News has 6 sub-markets that usually have 3 reporters in each.
Newcastle has more I think.
Plus camera operators.
So that is well over 20 staff there.
Plus the transmitter costs to cover such a wide area - there’d be probably 40 transmitter sites they’d have to run.
And sales offices in each major town.
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