This would be my preferred option too! Ten Illawarra etc. All the time wasted on low-rent WIN branding could be spent on producing better content.
Bruce is far too proud to give up WIN, but he is 89 now so really, a couple more years and things will look different. I’d say though the local news will be cut to noodles when Brucey kicks it. Hopefully CBS will pick at the bones though, probably snap up NNSW or SNSW to bolster their reach - if not the whole ‘network’ if the ownership rules have changed by then.
There’s no real point purchasing the regional affiliates though - the sale of NRN to WIN shows they are still worth too much, but the stations have been cut to the bone already, there’d be little efficiency gains to recoup the cost.
CBS should just negotiate a better affiliation deal and be willing to walk and see if WIN really will jump and try and go their own way.
So they have! Don’t know how I missed this, but we don’t get too much news about Australian media in Portugal.
Like every business a TV station is valued on its profitability. The recoup in cost comes from selling advertising. As you say, the cost-cutting has already been done. What you are buying is the license and transmitters - as most of the other infrastructure is gone.
The business case for CBS would be the same as was Nine expanding to Darwin and Newcastle, and Seven in regional Qld: simply to increase its reach. The question is, does CBS have the staff and resources to “run” another license and service the local news requirements? At the moment the answer is likely no.
I doubt CBS would care enough to bother playing hard ball with WIN on a few percentage points on a P&L. The health of their biggest customer is still important to their profits.
WIN’s news operation would hardly be categorised as ‘expensive’. It’s run as cheaply as humanly possible. Yes, there are lots of WIN transmitters, but only three studios to reach 8 million people. Similar to Ten’s NEW/ADS/TVQ operation.
I’d be surprised if Bruce is running a ‘not-for-profit’.
If CBS was at all worried about declining profits in Australian TV, it wouldn’t have bought the lowest rating network in the first place. Their plan was reported to be to dominate English speaking media with their vast content catalogue on air and online and have since mandated a strategy of ‘home grown content’ for Ten.
But I guess time will tell. CBS will want to demonstrate financial growth and that will be either through improving the performance of the existing network, online offering or expanding the business overall.
You’d be surprised. What did NRN sell for? $50 million or something.
Media purchases are roughtly 6-8x EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation).
Which means that NRN alone generate a profit of $6-9 million after they pay for staff, transmission costs and affiliate fees. If anything, Bruce would have driven a hard bargain so it would be closer to the upper end of that range.
I was more referring to the infrastructure of having an operating studio building (vs a sales office with a news edit suite in the back).
If you look at Ten’s three smaller stations, one can make a crude comparison in terms of size to WIN. I know there are a lot of caveats in terms of the cost of transmitting across vast geographies in the case of WIN, but as I say, it’s crude.
So, in viewing the profitability of one station or another, we should consider that Ten as it is today is just an arbitrary grouping of TV stations. Indeed for several years NEW, ADS and CTC were owned by Charles Curran while TEN, TVQ and ATV were owned by Northern Star/Canwest.
Seriously? C’mon, let’s allow this discussion to play out in the manner in which it was intended. Unduly picking on points in an irrelevant way is just annoying.
I didn’t describe TVQ as small.
The Ten Network is the owner operator of five stations. TEN enjoys the largest reach followed by ATV. The three other stations are smaller.
I clearly outlined why I grouped TVQ, ADS and NEW.
I guess it depends upon which benchmark you use to arrive at the threshold of ‘expensive’. WIN’s Canberra bulletin is put together for a much lower cost that SC Tas, for example.
If we use SC Ten’s noodle updates as the basis for describing news as ‘cheap’ and NBN Newcastle as the benchmark for ‘expensive’, I’d say WIN fits neither of those categories.
Yes, WIN news costs ‘money’, but the lowest amount of money in order to create something watchable.
It looks like Bruce has acquired some more relics from the past to schedule in prime time on Saturday nights. 1980s British crime series Bergerac will screen on WIN’s One channel from 8.30pm while affiliate Ten is running much more recent episodes of Hawaii-Five-O.
It’s interesting that WIN should be running this considering Bergerac was originally produced by the BBC in association with Australia’s Seven Network. The last time I remember seeing this on Seven they were airing it at 2.00am.
You have to wonder why WIN would bother acquiring this content for a multichannel considering the amount of money they pay Ten in affiliation fees.
