General TV History

When Equalisation via Aggregation was passed, licensees holding two or more licences in the same approved market were given the option of amalgamating the licences. ENT chose to amalgamate the GMV and BTV licence into one - for a short time it was called RTV, but later changed to VTV. Southern Cross chose not to, and retain BCV and GLV as seperate licences for Western and Eastern Victoria. The Albury submarket is in The GLV licence area along with Gippsland. Why they would chose to do it that way I don’t know, but SCA could, in theory, sell, say, the GLV license to another operator.

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Yes; I knew RVN and AMV were aligned as a cross border operation. It did make sense to aggregate AMV into the Victorian market though; Albury/Wodonga is much more aligned to Melbourne and Victoria than Sydney/NSW in footy code as well as in other areas. The TX at Mount Baranduda is also firmly in Victoria.

Thanks for that additional information @shadowmask- it looks like it was mainly an administrative decision.

I have an old 1999 ACMA book in my possession which prompted the query.

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Most regional stations chose to amalgamate callsigns in aggregation (e.g. BTV + GMV = VTV. CBN + CWN + RVN = CBN. DDQ + SDQ + RTQ = RTQ) but BCV and GLV (both owned by Southern Cross) took it on their discretion to keep the 2 call signs separate (and to this day they still do).

So BCV covered Bendigo/Central Victoria and Ballarat/Western Victoria, while GLV covered Gippsland and Goulburn Valley and Albury. Even though technically Bendigo was the hub for the broader market anyway.

For some reason no other regional stations did the same in aggregation but apparently could have very easily done so. ABA (as it was then) left it up to licencees to go one way or another

EDIT: sorry, i didn’t see @shadowmask response first :no_mouth:

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I did notice a GLV repeater at Echuca- that’s getting towards BCV8 territory but folk there would have probably watched GMV6 Shepparton as well.

GMV6 had translators in Eildon, Jerilderie, Deniliquin, and Alexandra while BTV6 had translators in Nhill, Warrnambool, Hamilton, and Portland.

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Would’ve gone down as the biggest winner ever in Australian game show history with the record still standing today.

Rob “Coach” Fulton and Martin Flood won $1,000,000 on Millionaire in 2005
Andrew Skarbek won $1,016,000 on Million Dollar Minute a decade later

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I would have thought Echuca was under BCV coverage area for central Victoria / Swan Hill but I know Echuca used to pop up in ads on the old GMV6 so suppose it could have fallen within the heritage GMV footprint thus making it a GLV :thinking:

EDIT: According to the myswitch website, Echuca either gets signal from Mt Alexander (Bendigo = BCV) and/or Mt Major (Shepparton = GLV), so depending on where they point their antennas they could get either… or both! Does not appear that there are any local translators there now, though.

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Yep, my understanding was Echuca got good signal from either Shepparton or Bendigo, so didn’t really need translators locally. In the analogue days at least antennas in town from memory pointed either way (or sometimes both ways). Further north toward Deniliquin was a different story where the signal from both main sites was a fair bit weaker, hence the GMV translator

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According to this brochure from Hills Antennas in 1991, Echuca wasn’t even designated as a translator site within the Goulburn Valley coverage area so that aligns with them getting good signal from Mt Major. And it appears at the time Echuca was part of the Goulburn Valley coverage area.

Looks like by 1999 only AMV (Prime) and GLV (Southern Cross) had UHF translators in Echuca. Perhaps the VHF signals from ABC (ABEV1 Bendigo) and WIN (GMV6 Shepparton) were enough that they didn’t need a local translator??

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$2,000,000 offered on Deal or No Deal in its first season in 2003 was the highest ever prize offered on a game show in Australia but it didn’t go off.

I remember staying at a caravan park in Echuca in 1984, and the owner told my parents that there was no TV available because “the transmitter was over the other side of Bendigo”, thus inferring that reception wasn’t very good.

I asked them what about Shepparton, my folks said that they didn’t know about that.

Of course, that could simply be the owner being cheap and thinking we would believe him.

I also noticed that Bendigo had a community television licence in 1999- does anyone remember it?

Ten News promos from 2004-2007 uploaded by “heymannyg”:








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Yep, there was never any translator in Echuca.

I heard that Bob Peters did the voiceover for the TEN News promos in 2004 even though he was doing V/o at the Nine Network.

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I thought Phil Baildon (who was still a prominent VO at Network Ten back then) did the “Who makes Ten News the #1 show/First At Five? You do.” voiceovers for those 2004-05 promos.

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I wonder if it would be cheaper for Ten to screen repeats of Video Hits in the early hours of the morning rather than repeat programming

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Probably not as they’d to pay licencing on the music played.

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Is that the agreement for all shows like Video Hits?

Any show that plays any recorded music. Sometimes TV shows will produce and record their own tracks to avoid paying for recorded music.

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