You know, I’d love a free to air weather channel. WIN, get onto it. 
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I think Foxtel would relinquish a bit more than that. WIN could be just what they need to stay afloat and help drive subscription sales. Although, I would hate for WIN to end up like a ‘Foxtel preview’ service, similar to SNOW.
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I’ve long thought networks should make good on the fluff they put in their press announcements about their ad channels.
If you take something like WIN Gold, but have the ads in a corner with weather info, local news scrolls, and occasionally breaking for local community TV content - you would have a channel that would justify it’s existence.
If the channel occasionally had a niche fishing or local footy show on it, people wouldn’t automatically skip over it like they do with Gold now.
It was the one strength of TV4ME vs everything else we’ve seen since.
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If a big if WIN sign up with 9 in regional Queensland, Southern NSW, and regional Victoria, possibly Tas and regional WA, is WIN likely to remain a ten network station in Northern NSW?
Their description of GOLD makes me laugh.
Fluff to the max.
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There’s no program guide, of course. And very early morning has the atrocious Campmeeting religious program.
It’d be a little like PRIME in NZ.
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If WIN did try some sort of affiliation with Foxtel, the biggest problem would be the requirement of 55% Australian content for WIN’s main channel. Multichannels could easily be filled with back catalogue stuff but Foxtel would have to relinquish enough premium Australian programming to at least keep the main channel somewhat competitive. It would be an interesting exercise to see what that content might look like, as Foxtel does not have very many Australian programs that perform well - a couple of Lifestyle programs, an occasional short run drama and perhaps a special.
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Yeah but does the 55% Australian content have to be premium and perform well? I’m thinking WIN would do the bare minimum (surprise surprise) and schedule Sky News programs throughout the day. Which would actually be quite competitive in the end.
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It would have to be competitive if the want to get any advertising and hence earn an income. Sky News programming that WIN is allowed to show at the moment isn’t very competitive - especially in key demos. In recent weekly results it didn’t make single figures in the key demo groups.
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… the simple fact is that Hawke’s hastily-cobbled-together aggregation policy started the process of killing regional television more than thirty years ago … it may have taken a virus to bring it to a head, but there is no doubt that regional television is already dead and it doesn’t really matter who owns what or who is affiliated with whom … it’s all over bar the shouting …
Does TV outside major cities in other countries suFer so much?
Local TV in USA and Canada thrives
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Apples and oranges. Population is much more centralised in Australia compared to the US.
Aggregation was another short term sugar hit from Hawke, but you can’t apply the US market and population features to Australia.
no, not in the Philippines. in the Philippines all the regional relays are of the metro channels. till abs cbn’s demised they had there only regional channel but that was it
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plus the way local channels generate profits, ad shares and network affiliate agreements are totally different
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In the US local TV affiliates survive on selling airtime to networks? Lots of money coming in from the networks plus they keep all advertising revenue?
Here it’s the complete opposite, local affiliates pay 50% of shrinking advertising revenue to the networks for content and have to also maintain huge amounts of infrastructure/transmitters.
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What about Canada - lo cal TV is robust there.
Multiple Local morning news shows 6am-9am in markets of under 1 million.
more or less yes.
but on the flip side networks only fill about 8-9 hours a day on stations. the stations must go out and buy / create programming to will the other 15 hours a day. shows like Ellen, wheel of fortune and ET are not cheap. they also spend a fortune produsing local news content up to 6 hours a day.
They also have significantly higher staff loads and studios and infrastructure than Aussie local TV, as well as apps, websites to maintain. So there costs are much higher too.
Aussie local TV has done nothing to try and grow revenue outside broadcast in a meaningful way.
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No, in a network hour - a local station is lucky to get 2-3 minutes to sell. Most of the advertising is national and goes to the network. They keep 100% of revenue for 2-3 minutes an hour. Some commercial breaks have no local advertising at all.
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To @KICK-IT’s comparisons about the US and Canada markets, a little context:
The US has been able to achieve some stability through aggregation of its own. It’s called acquisition. We’ve got Gray, Nexstar, Sinclair and News-Press who own a ton of small-market stations. A lot of those markets CAN’T support more than two unique operations despite serving up the Big 4 networks and multis. That means fewer local journos.
Canada is an even worse example because a lot of regional markets there support only one station. There are a few out there owned by small groups or independent owners, but networks have increasingly been buying them up - anywhere from Terrace, BC, to Kingston, ON. Scale, of course, does help with the bottom line a bit, but the state of competition in Canadian local news is still heavily weighed to CTV. Global ends up doing things like taping the late news for metro markets that are not Toronto.
I’m sure many an Australian would find even these conditions more palatable than what they have right now. There’s been some legislative reform to make these changes possible. As of now, though, the ways of thinking down there remain old and stiff.
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