Are the Mt Gambier / Riverland feeds currently different? A single South East SA feed would make some sense.
Scaling back to a single broadcast frequency and dropping the multichannels - except maybe Gem/Mate for sports?
It’s hard to think though, what cutback doesn’t just see all viewers flee to streaming and ruin what remains of their advertising base? Dirty metro feeds outside of primetime?
I also can’t think what government intervention could work - if you can’t make a monopoly work, what can work?
WIN are looking to sell its Ten-affiliate Northern NSW station to Paramount (parent owner of Network Ten), which would allow Bruce Gordon to further increase his stake on Nine, potentially bringing a merger between the two companies.
If WIN were to sell NRN to Paramount, I would argue that could potentially spell the end of having duplicate services on the Gold Coast. There would be no need for them as they would be all under the one ownership respectively and would just be a complete waste of bandwidth having the regional services there.
The Gold Coast regionals are attractive to low and mid-range advertisers. Unless the metros were allowed to sell local advertising and treat the Gold Coast as a separate market then it’s possible, but why close down additional revenue streams?
Not 100% duplicate. There’s differences in news bulletins, commercials and some programming.
The Gold Coast regionals are allowed to broadcast local Gold Coast commercials while the stations originating from Brisbane are not (they must air in both Brisbane and GC).
To avoid confusion, the station formally known as Prime7 (Channel 6) airs Sydney news at 6pm, Sydney Weekender and ATN break times. NBN (Channel 8) airs NBN News at 6pm and WIN (Channel 5) rebroadcasts the 10 News First Queensland bulletin at 5pm.
As a regular visitor to the Gold Coast, I wouldn’t be surprised if barely anyone is watching the regionals. Many of the hotels here don’t bother with having the regionals on their televisions and just have the Brisbane channels. I would be interested to know if the Gold Coast regionals are making any money at all. The only reason there is regionals on the GC is because it’s a hangover from the RTN8 days.
If they’re only selling cheap local spots for (for example) 50 cents a piece or doing freebies/make goods, etc. they might have a full inventory of ads but they’re probably not turning a profit or covering costs, i.e. making money?
And are they even filling spots? Are they just running scenic loops to fill the time
Exactly right, aggregated regional TV isn’t the same as metro city TV in terms of sales when I worked in this area
There’s a lot ads that are either multi-market spots, or just freebies that the station puts in their to fill in the time
If a smaller regional station takes a feed from (for example) Brisbane, the idea that just because the ad break is the same length as the Brisbane station (because it has to be) would somehow mean that someone paid for all those ads in the the regional market is a false assumption
In the early days of aggregation, it was reported that some affiliates were selling local spots in their “new” regions for as little as $10 just to fill inventory.
