On Jun 18, 10:58 pm, Jim Ellwanger <[email protected]> wrote:
> G'day, mates. Got back today from a few days in Sydney and
> Melbourne. My hotel rooms were equipped with TVs. Some TV-related
> notes I scrawled while I wasn't out developing giant blisters on my
> feet. Didn't feel I could make this coherent enough for a blog post
> (and I may well be stating the obvious with some of this anyway):
>
> * The three fully commercial over-the-air networks are named Seven,
> Nine, and Ten, because those are their channel numbers in Sydney.
> Imagine if CBS were named "Two."
And in every other big city in the country. In the smaller regions,
when TV first started the government only licensed one station per
region and that station cherrypicked from the three networks. In the
90s, "aggregation" was allowed, where the regional station could air
in two surrounding regions by repeaters. This allowed them to become
affiliates of one network (some of the aggregators are owned by the
networks). The aggregator stations keep their own identity but often
use the graphics and ID packages of the network they're affiliated
with--and the aggregators that are affiliated with Nine are very
likely to use the Nine news theme music and graphics (Lalo Schifrin's
"Tar Sequence," the ABC-owned stations' longtime "Eyewitness News"
theme). I'll point out that Seven's news theme is a techno remix of
John Williams' NBC News theme.
>
> * "Fully commercial" because the other two over-the-air networks are
> government-funded: the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (no
> commercials) and SBS (has commercials). Both of these have digital
> secondary channels, which means the primary channels have recently
> become known as "ABC 1" and "SBS One."
SBS runs a good amount of foreign-language programming, including
during the day unsubtitled foreign newscasts. For years after they
started running ads, the programing was uninterrupted and the ads ran
between programs, similar to some state-owned European channels. In
the last couple of years, in order to compete with seamless
presentation on the commercial nets and advertisers complaining that
people changed channels before their ads came on, they had to start
interrupting the programs with ads. I assume that if they're doing
seamless, that credits are either squeezed back or genericed (and I
assume that the commercial networks are doing the same thing).
And I see that you avoided Aussie TV's most profitable contribution to
world television--the soaps "Neighbours" and "Home and Away." :)
Australia also invented the tabloid newsmag--the original "A Current
Affair" is still going great guns on Nine and Seven has "Today
Tonight"--both favorite targets for the Chasers and the ABC's "Media
Watch" show.
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