You are talking about “control” and “equity”. The fact is Nine is OWNED by Nine Entertainment Company. I don’t know where you get your figure from, but here is mine
Bruce Gordon has the highest shareholding of NEC through Birketu Pty Ltd at 15%, second highest shareholder is Macquarie Bank at 8%. The general public has a 12% stake in NEC and 15% is owned by private companies.
Unless Bruce Gordon owns investments in some of the other companies invested in NEC, I feel your claim as Bruce Gordon having nearly 25% equity in Nine is invalid, given Nine is owned by NEC.
Please advise of your source for your suggestions because NEC is not set up separately to Nine. It’s like trying to separate Woolworths Supermarkets from Woolworths Group, it’s not set up in that way. BTW, I own share in IAG, NEC and Woolworths Group Limited and have a thorough understanding of the company structure.
At the end of the day, if MDT does close these are the things that need to look at:
it will ultimately be Network Tens problem if they cannot maintain a presence there - Ten needs to determine whether a presence is worth the investment cost or whether streaming as the future of television will be their vision
whether this is a test case for markets like regional WA, regional SA and Tasmania that have similar arrangements in place (of 1 or 2 operators in the market)
whether viewers that have the available resources will bypass traditional television in favour of streaming. If you consider Seven (formerly Prime) with only noodle updates could be even more disadvantaged by this closure if people start streaming in these markets.
if people move to streaming will this mean a loss of some of the multichannels due to the potential loss of revenue.
All are factors I’m sure all stakeholders have considered
Whatever their motives, they are seeking change(s) from the Fed Govt who have not been at all responsive. Rather the Fed Govt seem to be hiding under their desks and waiting for market forces to drive the independent regional companies out in favour of national 7,9, 10 networks with 100% ownership reach by the one owner.
Ten has no control over this at this stage as I am sure they will not provide their content for free, they are a business not a charity. They already provide content for these joint-venture stations at a heavy reduced rate. Ten content has always been a problem regionally compared to metrop, even WIN couldn’t make it work in the larger markets without significant cuts. Just to wait for this one to close then I am sure over the next 12-24 months the others should start to fall such as CDT.
How much local advertising does MDT normally get? If MDT closes down and 10 decides streaming through 10play is the future, then I am sure national advertisers will take priority, and businesses in the region will have to go to Seven and WIN instead.
As both WIN and SEVEN jointly own MDT, they did not lose out on sharing the local advertiser revenue for themselves and not gain any extra when MDT shuts down. But it appears the costs of running MDT would outweigh any revenue sharing gain. This is all about lessening costs, not so much gaining extra revenue from the shared local pool I feel so as to keep the local STV and PTV operations sustainable in their own rights long-term. In other words, both the STV and PTV stations must be near breaking point themselves, and an easy fix is to shut down MDT as a test case to try and force Fed Govt action. This has a long way to play out.
But not much time left, only 4 weeks until switch off… I haven’t seen/heard anything from the Govt on this? They seem to be happy to let nature take its course on this.
I think CDT is the most likely to survive - just on the basis that the Government pretty much directly funds Imparja being on air in the first place, both with their support for Imparja itself, and funding VAST directly, so losing one of the main channels when VAST was supposed to be the fallback service for new blackspots after digital TV would be a lot harder to justify.
Indeed I would be interested if not having Ten on FTA would allow someone in Mildura to access VAST…
Half the battle, not just with MDT - but also PTV and STV is the lack of experienced sales people out actually selling ads … a softening market, you need smart and hungry sales people - you can’t just sit back and wait for customers to call up and book in ads - you need to get off your backside.
MDT has always been a basket case - initially ran with a solo salesperson - then bumped into the STV office - and then bumped over to SCA.
The current crop of sales staff in the local market are all D graders - I can factually say that there has been no follow up from PTV re our own enquiries re an AFL advertising package from last season, and the season prior - we are certainly not a small local business … you’d think that they’d be at least somewhat engaged with follow up.
I don’t think that the federal or state governments are that bothered considering it’s one region that is currently held by the national party at both levels of government.
I think that people from metropolitan regions don’t really understand that the levels of services can be significant lower in regional.
I think it will be await and see thing.
I wonder if the position would have been different if Ten still had Melbourne Cup rights or Bathurst 1000 rights and there were a risk these events would not be screened
If this is the start of something, I doubt it will stop with just the smaller markets - ultimately some of the larger markets will be at risk.
But it’s going to come down to what the Government and the regulator decide to do. Any intervention seems unlikely given its been radio silence, but will there be a push to try and reissue the licences and allow a third party to operate a service?
I wouldn’t be surprised if they were doing MDT slots for ‘free’ if you bought a big enough ad-buy for one of the other two
Or they know exactly what to do - nothing - intervention at best will deliver short-term relief, longer-term structural changes are required and I don’t think there is the political will (or desire) to deliver them - the Coalition offered the industry some opportunity under the Green Paper to make some more serious changes and they were pretty well rejected.
We are In the final week of parliament before the long winter break but can’t see any thing drastic happening in relation to media reform, Let’s just face the fact some of these joint ventures will soon cease to exist sadly Mildura being the first of them.
Has ACMA given any alternatives to Sunraysia region residents (e.g. making VAST available) so they don’t have to resort to unreliable internet to watch 10?
I think this issue will have implications at the next federal election too. Even though Mallee (which includes Sunraysia) is a safe Nationals seat, the inactions by the current federal government and ACMA on the impending closure of MDT will be regarded by locals as their interests being ignored by Labor.
I can’t see the ACMA re-allocating the licence even with a change of government the lesson learned from this will be that some TV markets simply can’t support 3 commercial broadcasters even joint ventures, Over the next few years It will be Interesting to see If other joint ventures are able to survive or fail like Mildura & WIN is actually reviewing their footprint In other areas of Australia.