Earlier today we received a barrage of text messages from Alex Boxcutter complaining about the poor Winter Olympics coverage on Channel 9:

No aussies in event means 9 don’t think we care. God forbid we’d enjoy something other than the summer swimming. Fucking disgaceful! I wish i had fox!
-Alex b

On Twitter we saw @mollyfud hitting his head on a virtual brick wall with anger.

The other night I saw what was neither worthy of being called an advertisement nor a faux-Getaway piece about shopping in one particular street in Vancouver.

So, tell us. Have you been trying to watch the Winter Olympics on TV? Have you been happy what Channel 9 have provided in terms of coverage? Has anybody out there bought the Foxtel package for the duration?

Let us know in the comments or through the contact form.

We’ll try to get some answers from Channel 9 in the meantime.

We’ll be discussing this new Freeview ad on this week’s Boxcutters. It launched last night. Watching it is all the homework you need to do this week.

The Australian reports that Sunday and Nightline have both been axed by the Nine Network.

Two news and current affairs programmes that once stood tall in the jungle of commercial network reportage are now gone. Over the past few years both shows, but Sunday especially, were stripped of their traditions and leadership.

It’s a sad day for network news.

Channel Nine will not be moving from its Sydney and Melbourne bases. They have withdrawn both sites from sale.

The Age reports:

The network is now expected to inject capital to digitise its Artarmon Road, Willoughby, studios in Sydney’s north, and the Bendigo Street, Richmond, studios in Melbourne’s east.
When PBL Media listed the properties for sale at the end of last year, institutional developer demand was buoyant, with the two properties at one time expected to have sold for $200 million.
But sharemarket volatility and a slowdown in the residential market changed the dynamic this year. It has been reported that Charter Hall lowered its price for the Willoughby and Richmond sites to about $165 million.

They just can’t seem to catch a break. What is going on with them? Also, it’s obvious from this latest debacle that since the whole PBL Media creation, Nine is being shaken like a piggy-bank trying to get the money out rather than being used to actually make great television.

Source: The Age

In a move that shows that TV networks might actually, finally, understand the way the world works, this was reported in the New York Times:

NBC Universal, acknowledging that viewers are increasingly moving away from traditional television viewing, announced plans today for a service that will make popular NBC programs available to download free to personal computers and other devices.

Then again, it says that the files will expire after seven days which means there’s some kind of ridiculous DRM present.
What do you think? Will this be another horrible failure? Has anybody been following the iTunes store debacle?

NBC to Offer a Free Video Download Service (NYTimes)

For those of you who missed the premier of Australia’s latest cop drama, City Homicide, Seven wants to make sure that you get your chance to see it because they’re showing it twice in the days leading up to episode 2. Once was last Friday night and the next one will be midday on Monday.

Considering that TV shows are generally bought with a limited number of repeats, has Seven blown its repeat load already?

Are repeats mostly a thing of the past with exceptions for Seinfeld, Simpsons and Raymond (or any other half hour filler on Channel Ten)?

We’re still trying to get a network programming person onto the show to discuss these questions and more.

Here’s an interesting piece from Variety that talks about how audiences leave shows mid-season when they take a hiatus, the pressures that involves and how the networks and studios are looking to change that.

In recent seasons, though, auds have been wandering off, sometimes never to return, when a show goes into repeats during its season run. That, along with record low Nielsens for repeats, has the nets embracing the idea of running an entire 22-episode season straight through, with no breaks.

TV shows take extra time for creative process — Variety

In derr Freddy (and I don’t know how we missed it) news, AllyourTV.com’s Rick Ellis interviews a studio employee about why he leaked the pilot of Pushing Daisies.

Read about it here.

(via TorrentFreak)

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UPDATE:
Whoops. Thanks to fourthof5 for pointing out that the link was wrong. I’ve fixed that now.

This news was from Tuesday (sorry for the delay and thanks to Paul Boxcutter for the heads-up).

Come September, Foxtel will be rebroadcasting Ten’s digital signal which also means they will publish the Ten EPG.

Now we just have to wait for Foxtel to open up their system to allow other pieces of software and hardware to have access and we might actually have a choice over how we watch our television.

Just imagine an openly competitive marketplace. A place where we can buy whichever PVR we want, subscribing to whichever EPG we choose (Ice TV really does have the best service out there), rather than being tied to one system. Alas, I seem to live in a dream world.

Still, I’ve now signed up for an IQ. I’ll be sure to keep the Boxcutters listeners/blog-readers posted on the ups and downs.

via The Age: Foxtel nabs Ten rights

Further to the “news” item that WIN would be showing Brady Bunch in the afternoon and why they would bother sending out a media release about it, a dedicated listener informed me of WIN boss Bruce Gordon’s current battle with PBL Media/Nine over content deals and pointed me to a Fairfax article from this morning:

“We’re out of contract and they keep threatening to turn us off,” Mr Gordon said. “We said, ‘Go ahead: take your programming off’, and we think it would be a lot of fun if they did. We can program this network. When I bought this network in 1979, there were no affiliation agreements.”

PBL Media, owner of the Nine Network, wants WIN to pay 40 per cent of its revenue in return for programming, up from the 32 per cent it pays under the current agreement, which officially expired on July 1.

Mr Gordon wants the fees reduced to reflect poor ratings, and to bring them into line with the 29 per cent of revenue that WIN’s main regional competitors, Prime and Southern Cross Broadcasting, pay their partners at Seven and Ten.

Apparently it is worthwhile to boast about putting on 35 year old repeats if it means you’re sticking it to the big boys.

WIN calls Nine’s bluff on program supply — The Age