@captaincupcake summed it up pretty well, in the first 5 points, though SEN isn’t just disliked in here, it’s not generally liked across the radio industry & going by ratings nor the general listeners outside of Melbourne.
2KY Sydney was probably the first commercial station to be more or less a sports station, back in the day, before it narrowed it’s programming to horse racing after being bought by TABCorp/Sky Racing & it did reasonably well, programming to the local market (Sydney).
In NSW & probably QLD, TABCorp/Sky racing was the original narrowcast racing channel & has plenty of backing behind it, I used to know a guy (now deceased) who used to own & race horses (thoroughbreds) & his radios would be locked onto the Sky Racing radio channel all around the stables & house, I knew another guy who owned & raced horses (Trotters) & he was the same.
Horse Racing is a big industry, not just owners, etc, but punters who listen, but to have a second narrowcast racing network in SEN track in the same areas is just pointless (given some areas have multiple God squad stations narrowcasting, also pointless).
As for general sports, Sydney & Brisbane aren’t big sporting communities (interested in football & cricket) but not to the extent as in Melbourne, & most of the stuff on SEN is still available on other stations (some who do it better), due to pre existing contracts before SEN moved into market, so SEN doesn’t rate.
In Sydney 2SM takes some SEN produced content, so you have the same thing on 2 stations in a market that’s not really interested, people not listening on 1 station is one thing, but nobody listening on 2 stations is not good, especially when one or both could be using the spectrum to cater to the market much better.
A sports station didn’t work in Sydney when Macquarie Radio tried it, SEN didn’t learn from that lesson have repeated it, (same will happen in Brisbane).
The Super Radio Network (BOG) gets bagged out for being cheap, but SEN is not much different, the listeners wouldn’t know, but SEN isn’t particularly liked in the industry for this reason. At least Bill has the money & risks his own investments in the SRN stations, from what I understand from others more in the know than me, the entire expanding SEN network is owned by non-bank “investors”, Hutchy has very little of his own money invested in the network & has very little risk if it fails. I have also heard, but have no reason to believe it’s not true, that at one stage not so long ago, Hutchy was hitting up all his friends & anyone he knew who had money, to throw it his way & invest in buying more stations/frequencies, to help expand the SEN/SEN Track network & this got some people offside.
SEN have big ideas & big plans that don’t really go anywhere too, for example, SEN Sydney on 1170 AM is licenced for 10kW with day/night switching, that SEN applied for a power increase after they took over 2CH, essentially all that needs to be done is program the transmitter controls to do this, but the transmitter hasn’t been touched since Nine Radio sold it & a tech who used to look after it, has said to me that they doubt anything will change & the transmitter power won’t ever go up to 10kW daytime from the 7.7kW it was put on by Nine Radio as 2CH, it’s a 12kW Nautel transmitter & is quite capable of 10kW, & so is the rest of the site, it’s just they can’t be bothered doing it.
