Presentation for the Spencer Gulf stations is at NPC.
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I do wonder what SCA actually have to sell to TEN or Nine or Seven.
I mean they have a few sales reps, yes, they sold there TX assets to various entities years ago.
What’s there for the networks to buy…I reckon it would be a hard sell to the various boards to approve a purchase…
I can imagine SCA handing back their licences to the ACMA and then the metro networks stepping in (out of the goodness of their heart) stepping in to provide a ‘service’…
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Just the licences, some sales reps and I’m not sure there’s much left apart from a studio or 2 in Tasmania and whatever real estate it still has. I think they might still have the old BCV8 building in Bendigo?
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I imagine Seven or Nine affiliates would run 10 programming on a multichannel. Kinda like how some smaller American tv stations operate with a main network and have The CW on a secondary channel.
Does SCA even own their own buildings? A way to get short term cashflow would be to sell them and lease them back at a set time. I imagine they sold their Canberra facility for a few million.
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Yep it’s still there. Sales and radio come from there I believe.
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Agree, either 7 or 9 would probably have to take 10s main channel and it would probably replace 7Bravo or 9Life to fit it in, I doubt they could reduce bit rates any further. And it would mean no 10Bold, Peach or Shake.
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Or a cherry-picked 7mate/10Bold 7two/10Peach 7flix/10Shake? Either way we won’t see them go dark.
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The days of paying for cherry picking are over. It is cheaper just to run channels straight.
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That point has likely passed - the meager value they carry now would be surpassed by the cost to operate.
The challenge for SCA is finding a willing buyer, or more probable, buyers. I can’t imagine that 10/Paramount would be interested in picking up non-10 affiliated stations.
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I predict someone like NewsCorp or Paramount could buy the SCA stations: NewsCorp will use them as a “shop window” for Foxtel and SCA already has a relationship with NewsCorp in carrying Sky News Regional. Paramount as a means of completing the 10 Network. But the Nine and Seven SCA stations could go to their parent networks or to WIN.
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Could the Ten service come to be classed as a supplementary licence and ran as a JV by Seven and WIN?
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I don’t even think Murdoch would bother. As stated above, the cost of running SCA markets would be close at the point of surpassing any revenue they currently generate. There will come a point in the looming economic downturn where SCA will just go dark and hand the licenses back to the ACMA. The only programming that would be cherry-picked by in the TEN-SCA markets would be the likes of the Melbourne Cup and not much else. It would not be worth the effort to cherry-pick anything else. That costs money to provide logistics wise, let alone buy rights for, money the likes of WIN and 7 or 9 do not have for those markets, not worth the bother. As such, Paramount might then be able to come to an agreement with the Fed Govt to pick up the TEN-SCA licenses for a very nominal fee if the Fed Govt were to direct the ACMA to sell the license in an open tender process. If no-one picks them up, the Fed Govt may just cancel the licenses for good, being Paramount will have done the sums and work out it may not be worth the effort. As such, TEN content in those markets will be the first to fully migrate to on-line distribution only. Interesting times. And on top of that, the only other option is a WIN/9/7 JV for those markets. Even that would be doubtful being they would do their sums and conclude again that it would not be worth the effort. Thereby leaving TEN content on-air only in select non SCA markets, with the NRN market being the largest and possibly the only regional market that currently breaks even for WIN.
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I think the key will be regional areas moving to running shared multiplexes, and sharing the costs of transmission.
That’s very easy in the case of this thread, the GDS/BDN transmissions could be closed down and the channels shifted over to be distributed between either 2 or 1 actual broadcast frequency. That was previously common in the early days of regional digital - I believe until 2010 MTN ran the WIN, Prime and Ten services all on a single digital multiplex, until the government threw them some cash to start providing multi-channel services.
As transmission/distribution costs would be a huge part of their fixed costs, as the affiliation fee is a revenue share not a set amount, I would think Southern Cross negotiating carriage of their Ten services on the multiplexes of WIN/Seven, rather than a license hand back scenario is more sensible.
It’d need some regulatory change, but this is in theory the direction the government wants to move anyway, as a shared multiplex approach is their means of achieving a second digital dividend.
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Disagree, there is money in selling most licences they hold, the problem is that their expectations are too high, so they will be happy to hold until such time the value drops to then be pushed into selling to those interested parties. The remainder may very well end up being handed back worst case scenario.
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The SCA(TEN) market licenses are not valuable if locked into only obtaining low rating TEN content, as Seven and Nine content is pretty much locked away for good.
And the commercial networks have made it known to the Fed Govt that they do not want to give back any of their spectrum to the Govt through spectrum multiplex sharing. And neither Seven nor WIN would share spectrum to SCA without a sizeable fee if it was not Govt mandated anyway which makes it all pointless if trying to save costs.
The Griffith market is not a great example to use, as that is entirely WIN controlled. To this day there are limited multi-channels and HD available in that monopoly market.
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They will if (when?) they’re compensated for it.
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I wonder if we’ll eventually see terrestrial Freeview split into two tiers, major Metro and Regional transmitters with full 5-multiplex service and infill/smaller regional/remote transmitters getting a slimmed down service with 2/3 shared multiplexes.
This occurs in the UK with many infill transmitters there only showing a smaller selection of channels (known as Freeview Lite).
I’d make the case though that VAST eligibility rules should be loosened were this to occur, with the shared multiplex sites no longer considered adequate service for the purposes of a VAST application.
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The Government will compensate Television and Radio providers, but havent bothered to compensate the thousands of others they’ve forced into spectrum shifts.
Spectrum is a valuable public resource that these providers get a significant free kick with - any compensation paid should be tightly controlled and should reflect the actual costs of shifting, rather than being a calculated handout.
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It was used in the context of this being the thread for Southern Cross’ example of a similar market, that even though they have 3 unique licenses, it’s been allowed in the past to share spectrum in those single owner markets.
It’d have been much better for Southern Cross to cut back on transmission costs before they axed their local news service. The joint venture markets are similar, in that there’s a direct benefit for all the existing operators to scale down to two transmitters - rather than pay for a loss making Ten service’s transmission.
I’d agree it’s a harder ask for WIN/Seven to allow a similar arrangement in the current three channel markets, but they’d be facing the same challenges on the cost of servicing markets outside the main high power sites - and if a competitor was offering to subsidise their transmission costs, it would be hard to say no.
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The only provider that would be subsidizing in the end would be the Australian taxpayer as per usual. Hopefully by then the shift to on-line only is in full swing. And that would not mean more people shifting to VAST. The likes of Starlink and others would possibly be what areas with poor alternative broadband may well end up using if they still want to view the FTA networks and their streaming services.
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