was the rationale based on politics and not population?
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re Shepparton/Goulburn Valley and SBS? I really don’t know.
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well Shepparton and Mildura are in National Party safe seats. That might be a reason.
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I was thinking that. But also in northern NSW there was a mix Newcaslte/Hunter with a strong Labor heritage and the north west and Northern Rivers and north coast by contrast were National party.
The only rationale I could think of is if the southern NSW model fell over an alternative model might have been to incorporate the Wollongong, Canberra and Newcastle licence into one with perhaps RVN and CBN another region and NRN and NEN forming a third, This is just what I thought could potentially happen back then and even some crossovers between states eg border areas such as Tenterfield and Goondiwindi as to which licence area they fell into
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A bit of digging non Trove has brought up the following numbers. The Commonwealth Of Australia Gazette of August 1988 has a list of service area populations for each commercial TV broadcaster across Australia:
For Victoria:
BTV Ballarat 308,003
BCV Bendigo 252,728
GMV Goulburn Valley 203,480
GLV Latrobe Valley 174,812
AMV Upper Murray 139,003
STV Mildura 51,238
The report acknowledges that overlaps exist between most of these stations with neighbouring markets. e.g. 67,253 (26.61%) of BCV’s service area was also within GMV’s coverage, and 46,294 (18.32%) of BCV’s service area was also within BTV’s coverage area.
STV had no overlap population with any other market.
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Been a while since I’ve posted, but I can assure you that Shepparton was always intended to be in the Victorian aggregated market. The idea was that jointly owned licences could be merged, so BTV Ballarat and GMV Shepparton would be one broadcaster, and BCV Bendigo/GLV Gippsland another (though they never actually consolidated). In the first draft plan for Victoria’s aggregated market, the 3rd competitor was to be STV Mildura. AMV (Prime) was going to be incorporated into the SNSW market.
Both BTV/GMV and BCV/GLV protested against this, arguing that it represented a major windfall gain for STV in terms of viewers, whilst the other two would lose viewers (assuming a roughly equal audience viewing split) despite having to spend millions in the process.
Also STV were the only station to initially indicate they would want to go straight into Aggregation, instead of the intermediate multi channel route. (And there was going to be a one in- all in rule for each aggregated market)
Eventually the government sided with the other two networks and Mildura was dropped from the plan and Albury’s market split from the Wagga market and included in the Victorian licence plan.
This of course pissed off Mildura viewers no end.
The reason most regionals wanted to go the Multi channel route was probably in the hope that, after setting it up, they could convince the government that the system worked, and it retained more localism (as they were only serving their original area) and of course they would keep their monopolies.
In the end WIN broke ranks for SNSW and declared they would go direct the Aggregation model, so CTC and RVN/CBN had to follow.
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Before RTQ joined up with them, DDS/SDQ were briefly known as Star Television.
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And before that, 10-4-5a … I still have a soft spot for those joint numeric station IDs… Like 9-8 Television, and 11-8… Midstate 6-8-9 was another.
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So was RTQ IIRC. They both had that name AFAIK.
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DDQ-0 - Star Television
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Star Television, a very short lived name.
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This ones for you. from 1983
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they couldn’t even find a matching top for the singer on the right? She’s just had to rock up with some t-shirt she dug out of the wardrobe
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Maybe Amber was in charge of wardrobe for that one 
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Amber’s mum.
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It was the 1980s. Choose Life and Espirit shirts were all the rage
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I remember Southern Cross TV8 (BCV/GLV) running a very public campaign against aggregation in 1987. One of their tactics was to say that each of the aggregated channels would show the same event (i.e. royal wedding), while a multichannel would not and therefore offer more choice.
There was also a bizarre campaign about the deficiencies of UHF TV.
These were obviously red herrings. It was more about protecting revenue, influence, and market dominance.
Fun fact - both BTV-6 and BCV-8 had their own news helicopters before aggregation (might’ve been leased). All very “Anchorman”…
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GMV6 had posters in their foyer with this same campaign and using the same example (Royal Wedding).
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The example of a Royal Wedding is a bad example saying you would have choice as in the case of this kind of event, most of the time the main channels would screen it - the Wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer is a good example of blanket coverage across the metro stations. And the stations quoted above did the same thing
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the point of the campaign was that under an aggregation model (ABC + 3 competing commercial channels), all would show the same thing i.e. the royal wedding.
Under a multi-channel option (e.g. ABC + GMV6-1, GMV6-2 and GMV6-3), ABC + 1 commercial channel would show the royal wedding while 2nd commercial channel might show a movie, and 3rd commercial channel show something else (I think the campaign used A Country Practice as an example)
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