Here is The Canberra Times’ The Guide on the Monday before aggregation.
And the front page of The Canberra Times on the day of aggregation.
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Hills Antennas put out these little guides to help bump up sales! (Although SBS frequencies were assigned, it was a bit premature to list them as in some cases it was years before they actually went on-air)
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Good old channel 8 from Rossgole. 
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Yes that’s it, along with nbn10uh 
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Yep. Very intelligent, attractive young man.
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A couple of articles from the Newcastle Herald on aggregation… but the difference being these are from August 1987! Nearly 4.5 years from when aggregation began in Nth NSW.
The timing of the articles relate to the television aggregation plan only being recently passing/gazetted. Though the idea of television aggregated was first mooted by the government back in 1984 (I believe).
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Possibly was, but the government announced it as policy i think circa May 1986.
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If you think about it, and if you didn’t see the consequences of the policy in the years to come, it was a slam dunk for the Labor Party.
1 - instant vote getter in regional and rural seats - who wouldn’t want more TV stations to choose from?
2 - piss off the Country/National Party, which found many a happy home in some of the country stations. IIRC, quite a few stations (aside from NBN, obviously - Newcastle was/is a major Labor stronghold) were quite sympathetic to the Country Party and in turn, the Country Party were against the equalisation/aggregation policy. I could be wrong on this, but I have read it in places.
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Which is exactly why they did it.
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But i wouldn’t discount my 2nd point either.
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NRTV in the north of NSW ran an ant-aggregation campaign, and the ads that I saw in early 1990 when I was on holiday in the Gold Coast seemed pretty aggressive. I believe they were the only one to do so.
Interestingly, about a year after aggregation when Optus became available and people had to preselect between Telstra and Optus for long distance calls (the only choices at the time) via a ballot, Lismore had the highest percentage who chose Optus (something like 20%).
Was there a link?
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Can’t see how… they just have more hippies and anti establishment type folk in that area, that’s probably why?
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BTV and NBN did too.
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I think even if aggregation hadn’t happened and multi channels were taken up instead, we’d still have a situstion kind of similar to what we have now.
Except that WIN might own say Wollongong, Coffs Harbour, Ballarat etc but run 7, 9 and 10 multi channels in those markets and centralise local news bulletins in one location.
And Prime owned Orange, Albury and Tamworth and ran 7, 9, 10 multi channels there and also centralised news in one location.
They may also have largely carried network only branding to save costs
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I agree, but would say that either the Liberals or Labor would’ve put this policy in. The Libs have prove they’re not above pissing off their coalition partners.
The timing to implement this (after the stock market crash - I’d assume the owners took a hit of some kind) and how it was implemented was all wrong though.
Local content regulations should have been baked in and areas like Cobar, Mildura, Mt Isa and Griffith should have been combined into the wider areas. South Australia should have been aggregated too if they did it with Tasmania and remote areas.
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Local content should be baked as a condition of the licence as it was to my understanding back in early days.
In some ways if the media company’s in regional areas were kept to being operated by a family group they in general are not as greedy and probably would have kept the localism at least to some degree. As if your company is private and not have to answer to shareholders and you don’t need to make millions of dollars in profit you could make $500k and invest the rest into the business. But with the downturn in the industry I still doubt it would have changed much in the larger scheme of things however unless the government had very specific restrictions on the size of the media companies. For example Prime could only own their NSW stations ie central west and north west and north coast north. Same with Capital and WIN. But I would say those laws would have been watered down over time.
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There were reasons why this didn’t happen.
The Multi channel alternative was only intended as an interim stage towards a more gradual shift to the aggregation model.
For many years a licencee could only own up to 2 stations. With aggregation and increasing networking between capital cities, the government later relaxed this rule to allow a licencee to have a maximum coverage of 60% (later 75% IIRC) of the national population.
It could have been that Telstra was an Australian government owned entity until 1997. This could have some influence. Another bit of random information around Telstra, it was known as Telecom Australia until 1995. Anyone remember the ad from Telecom saying about paying no more than $3 for telephone calls to landlines in Austrlia
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I’m not sure what the link is between regional tv aggregation and the telecom ballot? Or what Lismore has to do with this.
Maybe a protest against the government about choice, instead of a monopoly, people had choice leading to some moving away from government run entities in favour of private entities. Thats the only link I can think of unless he meant something else.
Ultimately, competition can be a good thing, especially if its not a duopoly. Although what we have now has its flaws in both telecommunications and television.
In the TV market, those in regional areas could be still stuck with just 2 TV channels and metros with 5 or 6 TV channels (depending on availability of Community TV).