Most commentary here when the channel launch suggested it wasn’t needed and would be better as an on-line resource. It was hard to judge the ratings because a viewer would likely only watch one bulletin in their language but overall that meant the station could barely ever rate above 0.0.
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Most of us in here agreed from the beginning that this channel wasn’t needed. As people only tuned into one bulletin of their native tongue, and then change over. Hence why ratings were 0.0% (at best, 0.1%, when they aired a random Insight episode).
Sbs and SBS2/Vice aired Worldwatch content during the day anyway, wven with this channel being on air.
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Is the channel number closing completely or is it going transformed into something else?
If the linear service were going to be reformatted, then the closure announcement would have been pointless. But since SBS has actually indicated that the service will be closing, it’s quite safe to say that it will simply fall off air with nothing replacing it.
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A shame the service is going away. Not really sure why they are still going to provide the bulletins on OnDemand though. Surely the bulk of the cost of a service like SBS Worldwatch was acquiring and arranging supply of the bulletins, and not the running of the linear service.
A service that provides a hodgepodge of in-language news casts is likely going to be beaten by going direct to the source. I have the ARD app installed installed on my streaming box, for example, and it provides a reasonable chunk of the television schedule (including die Tagesschau, etc) in full (50p) HD. That’s probably what’s triggered this to begin with.
The only value of any SBS in-language rebroadcast service would be for communities who can’t access their home countries’ broadcasters direct (elderly without internet, prisoners, rural areas) IMO. And those folk won’t be able to use OnDemand anyway.
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Worldwatch as the channel ends at 1:05am on the 18th September
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Is anyone going to record the closedown of SBS WorldWatch on channel 35 on early Friday morning? Interesting to see how it goes out and if it changes into something else.
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Is the loop still playing on terrestrial? On my IPTV stream it has just gone to black, and obviously on On Demand it’s already gone.
Video featuring the closedown
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The loop is still running this morning.
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Could World Movies be next on the chopping block? Similar reasons of viewing habits changing to online could potentially apply here too
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That same logic could be applied to most channels in that case.
World Movies is differrent - anyone can still enjoy a movie with subtitles, a bit different with news broadcasts.
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If World Movies closes down. Australian FTA TV is truly dead. Love that channel.
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Seeing the Reading Writing Helpline ad six times within the span on a single ad block is really funny to me I don’t know why. This channel’s always had two or three ads on repeat.
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Isn’t the justification for Worldwatch moving exclusively to SBS On Demand that it’ll allow the service to expand by offering more bulletins since it’s no longer constrained by a linear schedule?
I always thought it stupid to move the big bulletins (the likes of Italian, Greek, Spanish, Maltese) to a channel that wasn’t in HD and that no one knew about. As someone who watches 20 Heures semi-regularly, it pissed me off. I still think there’s a place for these bulletins on linear, and I think they should just go back to how it was before with the bulletins taking up the dead space during the day on SBS/SBS2. I’d recommend having say, the European bulletins on SBS and the Asian/African ones on SBS2. Provide a destination in HD for what SBS is designed for!
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I’ve thought for a while that SBS could fulfill its programming needs on 3 channels, all in HD. Consolidate NITV & Food as one hybrid channel, SBS2 & World Movies as a films/subtitled offering. Sort of like what SBS were originally going to do when digital launched.
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