Sports Tonight

For the week October 2-8, 2011, Ten will be making one of the biggest changes they have made for some time to their nightly programming line up. Ten Late News will no longer air, and Sports Tonight will only appear as a sports brand during the network’s nightly evening news. Sports Tonight will not be seen at any other time, and is not on ONE either.

Without the Ten news commitment at 10.30pm, it will allow Ten to air programming that does not do well in earlier timeslots to play out at that time on the main channel, rather than disappearing from the schedule altogether or moving to digital channels. Ten have already experimented with 10.30 programming on Thursday nights, and also Monday night this week where Good News World moves to 10.30pm rather than 9.30pm.

Letterman will settle into a more stable start time of 11.30pm.

October 2 of course sees the premiere of Terra Nova at 8.30pm, while Junior Masterchef continues on Sunday and Monday nights 7.30pm. White Collar returns at 10.30pm Wednesday nights, while Law & Order will air on Thursday at 10.30pm.

The schedule looks like this:

Sunday Oct 2.
6.30 The Renovators
7.30 Junior Masterchef
8.30 Terra Nova two hour premiere

Monday Oct 3
7.30 Junior Masterchef
8.30 Undercover Boss Australia – Jbs Australia
9.30 Law & Order: SVU repeat
10.30 Good News World
11.30 Letterman

Tuesday Oct 4
7.30 The Renovators
8.30 NCIS new
9.30 NCIS: LA new
10.30 NCIS: LA rpt
11.30 Letterman

Wednesday Oct 5
7.30 Modern Family rpt
8.00 The Renovators
8.30 Glee new
9.30 Hawaii Five-O new
10.30 White Collar new (rpt for Sydney)
11.30 Letterman

Thursday Oct 6
7.30 The Renovators
8.30 Rush new
9.30 Law & Order: SVU Rpt
10.30 Law & Order new
11.30 Letterman

Friday Oct 7
7.30 The Renovators
8.30 The Renovators How To
9.30 TBA
11.30 Letterman

Seven is said to be considering a nightly sports news format that could fill the void if Ten axes Sports Tonight for good.

The Sunday Telegraph reported over the weekend that the Seven Network is looking into the possibility of running a late-night sports show that would capitalise on the likely departure of Sports Tonight.

Ten are yet to officially axe the show, which has been running for eighteen years, but insiders believe it will conclude after the footy season ends in October.

Source: The Spy Report

Network Ten interim CEO Lachlan Murdoch will today begin to make cuts in the network to curve high spending with the intention of ‘re-allocate our resources to better compete in the market’ (Murdoch).

In the first major announcement in this saga, it is reported that while 6.30 with George Negus will continue, Sports Tonight will be axed. The latter’s axing has since been denied at TEN.

It is also reported that 22 people have been offered redundancies. These are the first of an expected 100+ cull of staff.

A clippit of the email sent to staff members explaining the cut from Murdoch read as follows;

“In the last few years we have gone from just five free-to-air channels to fifteen different channels. In our metropolitan markets alone Foxtel has added some six hundred thousand subscribers over the last five years, all receiving hundreds of competitive channels. And, of course, it is hard to quantify the impact of IPTV viewing during this time but we do know it is impacting viewing and the effect will only grow, and grow strongly. Our industry has become more fragmented and far more complex than ever before,” he wrote.

“Since 2005 our TV costs have risen forty five percent … or by just under two hundred million dollars. In this same period our ratings and revenue are broadly flat. It is clear to me that over this time we haven’t been investing our costs in all the right areas.

“Furthermore, due to a number of fixed cost increases next year around News, Eleven, and core programming such as MasterChef, without action our costs were going to continue to increase even further.

“In order to arrest this continued increase in costs and to allow us to re-allocate our resources to better compete in the market, I asked our senior managers some ten weeks ago to explore how we can run the business better. We established 20 workstreams across all areas of the business and appointed senior executives to lead rigorous reviews of each area.”

Meanwhile, publicity and marketing positions in Adelaide are set to be scrapped with ‘on air personalities’ also facing redundancies, according to AdelaideNow.

Other major centres are also facing similar cuts.

TV Tonight have a full rundown of current events with quotes from Murdoch. You can view this here.

This post will regularly update with new updates and I’ll try to keep you posted with any extra news over the next week.

Late 2008, the Ten Network announced that they would be launching ONE HD in March 2009. Ten were the first commercial network to announce and launch a secondary digital channel, and the first to sacrifice their main channel HD simulcast in favour for a secondary channel. Each of the commercial free to air networks currently are allowed just one HD channel and 2 standard definition channels. The main channel also has to be in standard definition.

ONE HD, a 24 hour sports channel would mean that main channel content from Ten would no longer be seen in HD. Until ONE HD launched Ten in fact had the most hours of HD breakaway programming at the time, including Sci Fi on Thursday nights, Neighbours catch up on the weekends, and time shifted news on weeknights.

ONE HD promised to deliver sport – the way it should be – in high definition – including HD coverage of the AFL games that Ten airs. Other sports on ONE include coverage of Australian Netball, Formula One, surfing, swimming, the IPL cricket from India as well as American Football and basketball. ONE also has soccer with Liverpool TV and Arsenal TV. Sports Tonight updates us with sports news, while a number of live panel shows like ONE Week at a Time and the Game Plan provide discussion on AFL, NRL and other subjects.

Due to low ratings during weeknight prime time hours, ONE has recently introduced ONE at the Movies and ONE Adventure to help lift the channels’ shares. Initially ONE at the movies features sports based movies, while ONE Adventure is documentaries aimed predominantly at “blokes” with shows like Ax Men, Ice Road Truckers and Black Gold.

But just how much of this content is in HD? The answer is – unfortunately, not that much.

Both the NBA and NFL (basket ball and American football) from the US air in HD. The NFL in particular looks superb – well worth watching just to enjoy some high def TV even if most of us have no idea what is going on! Also supposedly in HD is One Week at a Time and new NRL discussion program, The Game Plan. Other programming in HD includes The Pro Shop on Monday nights, WWE on Thursdays, RPM on Tuesdays and drag racing. Some of the movies aired on ONE are in HD.

Shows not in HD on ONE include Sports Tonight, and both our local netball (ANZ Championship) and basketball leagues. None of the ONE Adventure documentaries are in HD, nor is Escape with ET which airs most weeknights at 6pm. Liverpool TV is not in HD, and other regular programs like Omnisport are not either.

Looking at the next week of programming, there is less than an average of an hour and a half of actual HD programming on ONE HD during the prime time hours of 6pm – midnight. Some nights have none at all, while Thursdays, Saturdays and Mondays have the most HD content – two and a half hours on Saturday night, two hours on the other two nights.

To be exact, and based on the internet TV guide for ONE HD from their own web site, ONE HD has just 11 hours of HD content during prime time in a 7 day period*. If both the week’s movies were in HD in the coming week, that number would have risen to 15 or 16 hours. This is out of a possible 42 weekly prime time hours.

Most TV guides will not tell you if a show is in HD or not. Printed guides these days give no hint, and not all internet guides tell you either. Two that do – but only when you click on each show to look – is www.youtv.com.au and tv-guide.onehd.com.au.

But just because a guide indicates a show as being in HD – doesn’t necessarily mean it is. Looking at The Game Plan (NRL) from last Thursday night (March 17), it certainly did not look to be in HD to me. The clarity was no different than a standard definition program.

Like I stated earlier, I have seen NFL in HD on ONE – and you can really tell the difference between what is HD and what isn’t – regardless of what the guide tells you. Perhaps it was just that one broadcast of The Game Plan that was not in HD? That being said, the result is even less HD programming on ONE – once you start including shows that say they will be in HD but actually are not.

It is not known whether Ten actually procures any of their main channel content in HD – given they have not have an HD channel to air them on for two years now, they probably don’t to save on the expense. But shows like Glee, NCIS, House, The Good Wife, Law & Order, Hawaii Five-O to name a few, as well as Neighbours (yes – even Neighbours), Dexter and All New Simpsons are all made in HD.

Subscription TV channel FOX8 used this fact to promote Glee as being an exclusive in HD – as the series had never been seen in HD in Australia before it was being aired on FOX8. Looking forward to season 22 of the Simpsons in HD on FOX8 HD once the Ten network are done with the new episodes, currently airing on digital channel ELEVEN.

Next Part: Part 3: ABC news 24.

* 7 day period for ONE HD was based on Sydney programming from Wed Mar 16 – Tue Mar 22.

Read part 1 here.