Informercials

Well – that didn’t take long.

Home Shopping hits GEM.

Weekday mornings from Monday November 8. 2am – 5am (or Sunday – Thursday nights from Nov 7 depending on your perspective).

Now you can see Home Shopping on ALL THREE OF NINE’s channels at once, 5 days a week.

There goes one of the very few free to air TV options after 2am.

No more overnight repeat blocks or programming of any nature worth watching.

Home Shopping was introduced to GO in April2010 – 8 months after the channel launched. Home Shopping comes to GEM – 6 weeks after it launched.

We understand free to air TV is a business that needs to make money – and that paid advertising in the early hours makes them more money than standard advertisements alone BUT having Home Shopping over THREE CHANNELS at once for the same network?

Surely one of the channels can be left with some sort of programming in those hours?

That’s one less late night option in free to air TV.

Really feel for people who only have free to air and do not fit the 9-5 mould, work shift work, out late – basically anyone who is up past 1am.

I cannot believe it.

A channel I had always praised for being free from home shopping overnight and for giving viewers the opportunity to actually watch something between 1am and 4am.

I am talking about GO!

According to the advanced TV guide for GO for the week commencing April 11, GO will see Home Shopping introduced five nights a week between 2am and 4am (Mon-Fri – at least the weekend nights will not have infomercials at this stage).

The move spells the end of the three hour prime time repeat block from 1am – 4am – a time which was incredibly useful for recording shows when there were too many clashes from their original air times of 8.30 – 11.30pm. Now, only one of the shows out of the three hours will be repeated.

Now – I know ratings are low in those hours – barely few thousand for most shows – but surely having a show on would be preferable to Home Shopping? There are still ads to fill, advertisers will still pay some money then.

Ratings for GO’s shows overnight are higher than any other channel, and some shows attract many times their live view figures in 7 day PVR recorded figures – I would imagine for the very reason I outlined above – too many clashes during prime time. I for example record ER off the 2am repeat (thankfully ER will be the 1am repeat for Thursdays) because it clashes at 9.30pm with other shows I am watching or recording.

Surely – if GO’s mandate is still to be a youth channel (and I think they are getting more and more away from the youth channel idea as time goes on in favour for more classics) they should have programming overnight, and not home shopping infomercials as it is the youth demographic more likely to be up at that time at night, working part time, studying, or simply going out late any night of the week who are home or up at odd hours.

Now they will have one less free to air option after 2am. Disappointing, to say the least.

If you look at the 7TWO program of late, you’ll notice there are more and more infomercials creeping in. Until recently, 7TWO had infomercials only one night per week, now they can be seen daily at 5am as well as a number of other times overnight.

While past AFL games are more filler programming for over night, at least it is something to watch as opposed to infomercials which are not watchable at all. Fortunately, both GO and ONE do not air infomercials (better clarify here – the infomercials I refer to in this article are those 30 minute blocks of programming dedicated to a single product. There are shorter ads of a similar nature that run for 1,2 or even 3 minutes that you see at varying times on just about every commercial channel).

The main commercial channels – Seven, Nine and Ten generally have around three hours of infomercials over night. That leaves very little free to air viewing options after 1 or 2am.

With both SBS channels on weather watch over night, ABC2 closed from 2am – 5.30am, ABC3 closed all night, and infomercials on the main commercial channels, those of us who are up late or get home from work during the night are left with very few options.

Only ABC1, GO and ONE provide programming throughout the night. 7TWO you can include most nights if you don’t mind watching AFL matches from the past.

Sadly, infomercials remain a good option for networks because they get paid to show them, and they rate well enough to justify being on air. Yes, unbelievably, most half hour infomercials rate around 20,000 nationally which is better than the few thousand that watch regular programming overnight.

You’ve got to feel sorry for those who do not have Foxtel and are up very late stuck with free to air TV only. Apart from the ABC, no free to air network offers continuous programming throughout the grave yard shift from Midnight to dawn.

Ch 7 have recently added an extra hour to their over night infomercials, running from 1am to 4am. And on Prime, its even worse – they get informercials right through to 5.30am. Strangely, 7HD on weeknights finish at 2am or so before reverting back to normal 7 programming. 9 and NBN has 2 hours of infomercials from 2-4am, and over at Ten, its 2 hours from the ridiculously early 12.30 through to 2.30am. SC10 has 4 hours. So between 7, 9 and 10 there is half an hour when all you can see is informercials. On top of that, the regionals have extra infomercials during the day. One example is 11am on NBN. They don’t show the 11am news that is on 9 instead having infomercials for half an hour.

So why is this the case? There was a time when there used to be programming overnight. You could see old episodes of Prisoner on ch 10 in the early 90′s at 3 or 4am. Ch 7 used to have News Overnight – a collection of (mostly) NBC news shows from the US. Ch 9 used to play old movies. Going back further, 10 used to have music videos over night.

Obviously the networks are paid to show these infomercials, but in my opinion, I can’t imagine anyone would be actually watching them – so therefore why would an advertiser bother? It would be better if the networks showed actual progammes at those hours as they’d be able to sell the advertising space to regular advertisers or just have the two minute infomercial style ads in the breaks like they have on some of the Foxtel channels and daytime TV.

Of course, this advertising space would be quite cheap, but that’s not a bad thing – it would give companies who usually cannot afford to advertise on TV the chance to advertise cheaply. And if paying staff to work that late is an issue, then pre-record the night time programming during the day. That way, there is no need for any additional staff overnight. Why not replay prime time? 2 or 3 hours of shows from 7.30 onwards repeated overnight. All that would need to be done would be to change the ads, which, if they were pre-recording, they could insert the different ads into the recording. Apart from providing something for people to watch, this would give viewers the chance to watch a show they may have missed earlier.

At least we have the option of watching sports free to air on ONE HD. According to their program, sport continues overnight, uninterupted. Perhaps 10 could broadcast ONE on its main channel instead of informercials overnight. And as for SC10, well they have not yet informed anyone as to when they will offer ONE HD, but an announcement is tipped to happen within a week or two.