I’m 28 and feel the same way, but also feel strongly about Ten Capital/Southern Cross (setting foot in that old building in Canberra every day for a while before they tore it down felt a bit like a dream come true)
I don’t feel any strong connection really to 7/9/10 (although I have fond memories of Ten during some of its golden years in the early/mid 2000s)
Feel my interest in TV (in general as an industry) is basically gone now that it’s so generic and bland and just feels like it’s shoved down our throats directly from Sydney (Sydney/Melbourne ‘culture’ doesn’t really feel like my culture, if that makes sense)
I get that people have an affection for the things they grew up with but I feel that real “local” television died decades ago. The local stations I grew up with bore little resemblance to the city networks and provided a valuable service to local communities. I’m surprised it has taken this long to end the charade that these regional stations are anything but relays for the networks.
Regional areas are booming more than ever yet the available audiences aren’t being serviced with relevant local information and entertainment that reflects their communities. Local news, particularly in WIN serviced areas, is a joke. They may as well have stripped the names when the local news bulletins were abandoned in many areas 30 years ago. There hasn’t been much to distinguish them from the city stations for a long time.
The Hawke government’s communications policy with regard to aggregation has a lot to answer for. Many saw that three local stations in large regional areas would be unviable and local production would be decimated and it turns out those predictions were correct. Regional television sucked dry by affiliation fees and a model that was bound to result in even the most successful regional stations unable to afford to deliver relevant local content. Local voices silenced.
Regional viewers wanted choice but they’ve paid a heavy price for it.
Overall, regional viewers get more value out of having the same choice of programming that viewers in the capital cities get. Aggregation definitely has achieved it’s goal in that sense overall we are better off for it.
But as you said, there is a price and and local television is dead (although really it mostly died a long time ago, as you have stated).
I get the nostalgia. I grew up in Mandurah, WA, where we had both GWN and 7 (the former was on channel 3). I mostly watched GWN of the two, and when we moved further south in 1993, it was my only option other than ABC, and later WIN. Later in life I lived in Perth without GWN and then moved across to Prime territory about 12 years ago (I watch NBN/9 here more though). I won’t necessarily miss GWN, but it will be something I look back on fondly.
GWN has been part of my entire life. I based my WAtvVideos logo on their iconic mid-90s logo. It will be weird not seeing GWN7 when I tune in a TV for a friend or scroll through the list of channels on my recording software. Otherwise, as @NewsWeary pointed out, it’s a shell of its former self these days and really makes little difference. Many aspects of life have become nationalised or globalised and we demand the same services as people in the city whether it’s retail, communications, government services or media choice.
Thing is, it would still be viable, but you need to be affiliated with Seven or Nine, and the affiliation fees need to be no more than 40% at the most, and that is with IMO some goodwill to get there, and IMO only Seven delivers the numbers to get that. Go back almost 20 years, the affiliation rates were 28-33 per cent, and the regional network also wasn’t under contract to relay the metropolitan network for 23 hours a day.
I remember seeing a news report from the start of aggregation back around 1989 (many of you have probably also seen it) where Seven/Nine said even back then they expected the regionals to pay more in affiliation fees once they got on their feet and were more firmly established
I remember vaguely that GWN used to play programs from more than one of the major networks until WIN came on the scene in WA. So they must’ve had multiple networks they were affiliated with.
Not to mention the national streaming coverage the metro broadcasters have which removes any opportunity for the regionals to continue being a profitable relay service for them.
they weren’t affiliated as such, they just cherry picked programming from the three networks, as all regional stations did before aggregation, but in most cases regionals generally leaned towards Nine programming as it was the most popular. Once WIN arrived, GWN aligned with Seven and WIN aligned with Nine/Ten, although from memory there was some preliminary indication that GWN was going to align with Nine which put it at odds with its parent company Prime that was affiliated to Seven in the eastern states. But it seemed common sense prevailed and GWN went with Seven.
I only recall it was very early in the peace when it was apparent that WIN was on the way, and it might have just been a thought bubble that didn’t go anywhere. Likewise when NTD8 in Darwin had the idea of affiliating with both Nine and Seven before the second commercial channel began there and trapping the new channel into a Ten affiliation, but that also got undone because it was deemed anti-competitive.
Prime really didn’t always seem like they wanted the Seven affiliation - the blue and yellow branding period seemed to be where they wanted to totally disconnect themselves from the metro branding.
I’d have to wonder if they seriously ran the numbers over flipping to Ten, or at least trying to pinch the Ten affiliation off WIN WA - they sure did put a lot of work into establishing a unique and distinct brand for a station that just relayed Seven for all that time.
I suppose that’s part of why these brands going away feels so significant - Prime for ages tried much harder in establishing their own brand. For as independent as WIN tried to be - they followed the network much closer than Prime did - Prime felt much more unique.
Yeah out of Prime and WIN, Prime did have the most independent look and feel, despite WIN going down in history as being the most aggressive with covering up the full Nine brand. Blue and yellow was such a bizarre choice now that I think about it.
I’ve watched more GWN7 these past few days than I have for the entire year and I tell ya what, the amount of 7+ promotion is insane. Literally every break. Sign of the times!
Affiliated is the wrong way of thinking about that. They had no affiliation, they had a monopoly in the area and would just buy the shows individually from whoever they liked.
Multiple stations in the same area forced everyone to affiliate formally with a metro station, all though there wasn’t strictly any requirement to do so.
And my 35-40% does account for that, which was agreeable, however once you get past that mark, all you are doing is screwing your so-called partner and asking them to continually cut back until what we have now.
WAtvvideos is also right that on top of this, they also show their programs and provide their state feeds to each state online, which I still think is preposterous while expecting top dollar from the affiliate. There should be a further decline in rates to account for that.