Outta Control

Sunday, 23 January 2011

I'm back folks!

I was never really gone, but I've had a busy year between welcoming a fantastic new member to my family, dealing with an increasingly hectic day-job and rediscovering my passion for Video Games which kept me away from the television for a good part of 2010.

What little TV I did watch was mostly via Foxtel so I lost touch with the world of Free to Air (FTA). But recently I'd begun to notice that FTA has done some catching up in the past year.

Two new channels (7mate and GEM) virtually sprang up out of nowhere and while there's a certain irony in 80's 4:3 reruns and Lifetime movies taking up valuable HD bandwidth - they still add to the variety and the main selling point of digital television.

Then we had ABC News 24, Launched in time for the snap election earlier this year - again taking up valuable High Definition real estate in a weird attempt to recover lost ground from Sky News which in 2010 had come into it's own with the outstanding Agenda and Paul Murray programs.

Finally this month we've seen the launch of 11, using the number (whoever at Ten got No's one and eleven reserved is a legend, far better than 72 or 23!) gives a sense of importance and more importantly the netlet's schedule is a huge throwback to the way Ten was back in the 90s, before the dark times, before Big Brother.

Back when I was still doing this blog on a regular basis I was covering the 3 commercial nets and the ABC, now look at it!



I've excluded SBS, the ABC netlets and OneHD (because it's a failure in my eyes) but even then - there's 9 channels - the colour scheme is getting a little crowded - so I'll appreciate any suggestions on how to present the chart going forward.

But here's the first new one anyway - the most striking thing about it is the number of shows under a million, almost everything. Sure it's still summer - but I suspect in the future anything above 800,000 viewers will be considered a rousing success!