Moe
February 3, 2021, 11:12am
2442
Will just copy paste my analysis from last time this came up, nothing’s changed -
No one wants to be the Ten affiliate - they have the lowest ratings, and even worse regionally due to the demographics Ten target being skewed towards metro areas.
Southern Cross optimised their business for that, running an ultra low cost Ten affiliate, very little rebranding, bare minimum local content and more. WIN come into it with a high cost base, so they’ve learnt now how much more value a Nine affiliation has to them.
So, yes - it’s very likely that WIN are talking to Nine and making good offers to them to try and get that affiliation back. Likewise, there were those rumblings regarding whether SCA were booking multi-platform ad sales as sales for their radio station to reduce their television revenue, and thus reduce their revenue based affiliate fee share.
At the end of the day, a competitive process between SCA and WIN is beneficial to Nine - it’s no wonder the SMH/Age and AFR would stoke that speculation a bit.
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