The ‘cherry pick’ channels mostly ended after the supplemental licenses started - the only real cases of fairly broad combined schedules were the dual affiliate Seven/Ten stations of Southern Cross Tasmania/Darwin, and WIN in WA and Imparja with the dual Nine/Ten.
In other markets, you basically got two largely simulcast channels and were almost entirely devoid of the content of the third channel - so while to some extent it was still ‘cherry pick’ - that really only extended to major sporting events, standard programming from the channel was almost if not entirely that of a primary affiliation.
WIN SA (SES/RTS) for example - after “WIN Ten” launched as the secondary analogue station, the main “WIN” channel was essentially a full time Nine network affiliate, rarely showing Seven content, until it flipped to being a Seven affiliate, after which point it rarely showed Nine content.
In Mildura and Griffith, you had a WIN station as a Nine affiliate and a Prime station as a Seven affiliate - in the case of Midura, actually owned by Prime, and in Griffith, Prime was just used as using the off-air feed was a more cost effective way of getting Seven programming.
Mildura for example had the case of the Bendigo Southern Cross Ten being relayed over the local Neighbourhood Cable network (I believe on a week’s tape delay), because it was the only way of accessing the Ten content.
I recall that GTS/BKN was mostly a pure Seven feed once their SC Ten started, but I’m less certain here.
I recall that it was a dirty feed of Ten Queensland (QQQ) picked up from the satellite? So viewers in Mildura were seeing ads for businesses in Mt Isa and the like.
I’ve certainly read about there being a tape delay, which wouldn’t make sense if it was off Satellite, but I can’t find any good sources so can’t be sure.
… ah so funny you should mention Donahue … I actually imported that show and had to come to an agreement with the Commonwealth Film Censor, who censored all overseas programs for television in those days, to allow me to censor the programs myself … on some occasions, when the subject was current, I used to drive to Sydney airport, pick up the episode out of bond store, take it to TCN where they standards-converted it for me and drive back to air the program the following afternoon … ah those were the days …
… much more important, however, and a thorn in the networks’ sides, were movie deals … for example, when Fox finally released The Sound of Music to television, the 9 network paid a fortune for it and did a big launch with a major spread in Women’s Weekly and all that claiming “Australian Premiere” … except that all the regional stations had played it two months earlier … Packer was not amused …
… historically GTS was a largely 7-aligned station because its owner, Jim Sturrock, had a particularly close association with the ATPS (7) sales guy, Ron Booker and he got all kinds of cheap deals which suited his way of doing business …
In 06, it was pretty much as good as you could get without the Foxtel/Fox Sports channels - NCable was the only carrier (at the time) of a number of those Discovery channels and CNN Headline News from memory too
I’d probably say that the Neighbourhood Cable channel lineup is pretty close to what Optus Television would’ve had at the same time if they didn’t sign a deal with Foxtel some years before.
… no apologies needed … when you have worked in the business as long as I have, you tend to talk in jargon
… a bond store: goods not yet cleared through customs are held in a customs area, often called a bond store or bonded warehouse, until processed
… standards conversion: where programs were produced in the US using their NTSC 60Hz television system they had to be converted to the Australian PAL 50Hz system to be played in Oz … for the most part this standards conversion was done by the originator of the program, but in these particular cases we wanted to get them to air quickly so they sent us an NTSC tape and we converted them here … TCN 9 in Sydney had an analogue converter, ATN 7 had a digital converter … the digital was better quality, but the analogue was cheaper to hire …
Speaking of Griffith, do any regional TV stations have SOME sort of broadcasting directly aimed at that area? The last locally-produced bulletin ceased production 14 years ago, and now that I think of it, maybe WIN still airs some news updates for that region…?
I understand Griffith don’t get any news updates but they did relay the Wagga Wagga News into Griffith (with a Griffith based VJ when the full news bulletin from Griffith was cut) before it was axed totally in 2019.
Don’t think they relay the current Wagga Wagga News Updates into Griffith but could be wrong. There’s no legal obligation to provide any local content for Griffith.
ABNPQ – Australian Broadcasting Corporation Northern Peninsula Queensland
NCQ – North Cairns Queensland
SNQ – Sunshine Television Far Northern Queensland
