The STL tower at Toowong was pretty tall. There may have been a microwave link set up from Mt Gravatt to Toowong. This screenshot suggests there was, the dish at top pointing south across the river. The lower dish looks like the DSTL to Mt Cootha before being demolished.
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Yeah, was 10 days before aggregation had begun in QLD. DDQ playout had already been moved to NRN and had to be unscrambled in a hurry.
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And it was the first case of Bruce Gordon fucking around when it wasn’t needed.
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Not really Bruce’s fault, the blame goes to QTV for taking ages to sign an agreement with Nine.
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But it’s fun to blame Bruce. He’s the sacrificial goat of this forum.
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That’s what I remember!
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or Nine’s fault for trying to bleed QTV dry with exorbitant licencing fees
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now where have we heard that one before?
Australian television. The eternal dumpster fire.
Just watching Song Sung Blue (movie with Neil Diamond music) and it reminded me of the SEQ theme using “Crunchy Granola Suite”.. it may have actually been at the time when 10 was added to 8-1-5. I can see in my mind “SEQ” at the bottom of the screen and 8,1,5,10 sliding out from behind it.
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… back in 1984 no regional station wanted what became “aggregation”, we all got together and lobbied Bob Hawke at a dinner at the Sydney Hilton and while Bob promised me personally that he was going to “look after” me and my fellow regional television execs, in his speech he went off script (as Bob often did) and dropped that if he wanted to keep getting elected, he had to “look after” Kerry Packer too and history shows that’s exactly what he did …
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Nice to have you back CJ.
… aw, now you’ve made me blush!!!
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Reading through the “Prime Times”, I didn’t realise that Prime intended to buy Sunshine Television in Queensland? I wonder why that never proceeded and why Prime never ended up operating north of the Gold Coast?
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If this was dated 1989, I wonder if the economic events of the coming years scuppered those plans somewhat (either from Prime’s or ATN’s side)?
There was a reason why the purchase did not go through. I just can’t remember it. Will do some digging but might take a while.
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… there was an agreement to buy Sunshine Television for $110mil and a debt facility had been cobbled together to do it along with funding to keep the rest of Prime afloat … I was part of the due-diligence team that went to Maroochydore to run a ruler over the operation and my comments can be summed up by the single phrase “over-capitalised” … after the report, one small NZ bank which was only contributing $20mil fell over and the whole deal crashed and burned which led to Skase failing to meet his obligations to MGM so that deal fell over too leading to Skase’s ultimate collapse … fun times …
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Hawke also “looked after” Christopher Skase and Paul Ramsay.
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… not directly, they came in on the tail of what had been done as did Alan Bond and later the Canadian Canwest, but the whole thing can probably be summed up by the famous KP line “You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine” …
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Of course they did.
Australian media history seems to gravitate around his big fat arse. 
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IIRC after the draft indicative plan for Equalisation was released, the government sought the initial indication from the regionals which path they wished to opt for - immediate Aggregation or multi-channel first. All stations said MCS, except STV Mildura, who were the intended 3rd party in Victoria, not AMV. BTV/GMV and BCV/GLV went nuts over this and protested the inequity of the windfall gain to STV in viewer numbers, where as the other two had to spend similar large sums of money for, in effect, no extra viewers. It was after this STV was substituted by AMV in the Victorian Approved Market.
Once the final Markets were settled, it was WIN who first publicly declared they would go immediate aggregation first, which forced Capital and Prime to do so.
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