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ONE vision

TEN's Grant Blackley talks about ONE programming and says Thursday Night Live will air from Sydney with state contributors.

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onevAn interesting feature in today’s Australian newspaper looks at the arrival of ONE, and gives some good insight into why TEN settle on sport to brand its new channel.

It also says the network is looking to fill its content with “one-run” programs.

“Subscription TV is a highly repetitive model but this is not,” CEO Grant Blackley says.

“But that’s not to say if a major event happened in the middle of the night, we wouldn’t play it in the day so a larger audience can see it. But we are acquiring content on a one-run basis wherever possible.”

ONE also picked up the rights to the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi in partnership with pay-TV group Foxtel but has the full suite of rights (broadcast, web, mobile, pay-TV and radio) to the 2014 Games in Glasgow.

Swimming is another key sport locked into ONE but was previously broadcast on Nine (20 per cent) and Foxtel (80 per cent).

“It’s another critical piece of content because it offers a lot of hours and appeals to a very broad age group, and we now own that for the next eight years as exclusive content,” Blackley says.

“And with the PanPacs next year we’ll move to 1500 hours of swimming over a year. And that’s just for the events we know of today. David White is working with Swimming Australia to look at extending the season wherever possible.”

Motorsport will also feature heavily, with all Formula One races broadcast live on One and replayed later on TEN, beginning with this weekend’s Grand Prix.

“As we call the race we’ll say, ‘We are now moving to the news, but for those of you who wish to stay on ONE we have an interview with Mark Webber’. So there’s unique content on ONE and strong cross-promotion,” Blackley says.

ONE also has the broadcast rights to 25 senior golf tournaments, and in cricket it has exclusive rights to the Indian Premier League for 10 years and the Twenty20 Champions League for five years.

Blackley says ONE is also in the market for more domestic and international sport content.

In terms of format, he says the channel will follow live events around the world, ensuring mid-afternoon to prime time is focused on local events as much as possible.

“So from late night to early to mid-morning that’s the European time slot, then it’s the US from morning to mid-afternoon, and from then to prime time should be Australian sports.”

He also indicated Sports Tonight remains on TEN in its current form but will also be 7pm to 7.30pm Monday to Friday on ONE.

“So if you want your sports news, you’ll have a regular destination. And on Sunday at 7.30pm we’ll have a program wrapping the weekend of sport.”

Thursday Night Live is another new program broadcast from Sydney but with commentators in each of TEN’s five state-based studios contributing via satellite.

“If it’s around the time of the Australian Tennis Open, we may have Federer in the studio talking about it and getting everyone’s opinions,” Blackley says.

Although ONE is now on digital channel 12, TEN has plans to eventually convert that into yet another new channel.

“We have a reasonably clear idea as to what channel we’d prefer to deploy on the third channel but we won’t announce it any time soon,” Blackley says.

Source: The Australian

23 Responses

  1. I think it would be better to have an open ended 3rd channel. It would give them flexibility.

    They could show another sporting event if there are two matches on at the same time, or play out cancelled tv shows or cover some event or breaking news story.

    They seemed to be very strategic about TenOne and thought long about it. So maybe they will think of a workable concept.

    But again well done on launching a new digital channel. Hopefully it shames Seven and Nine into putting more effort into their channel.

  2. I agree with the others. I have long thought /suggested Ten would use their new SD channel for a music channel… but they kinda muddied the waters by introducing sport on OneHD/SD… but I could still be right. It plays to their demograph, which may, ironically, be a bad thing if they are trying to pull viewers from Seven/Nine.

  3. Ryan, I imagine there is no soccer on One because Fox already has exclusive rights. Things will get more interesting as Fox’ rights agreements start to run out and One start bidding against them. We might get cricket tours on FTA again, and soccer (A League, EPL and others); or Ten/One could get all 9 AFL games each weekend.
    That would all be so sweet, but its not likely to all happen. And, of course, it won’t ever happen for those relying on SC10.

  5. Is it possible when the next round of AFL TV rights are up that One/Ten might go it alone and put their extra AFL games on the sports channel rather than on selling to foxtel. That is of course whether the anti-siphoning laws for sports events change. They could even go for the domestic international cricket rights from channel 9 when their are up as well.

  6. Somehow I doubt Ten would venture into a news channel, as if you look at the ratings, Ten is hardly competitive in this area. ABC4 is a proposed 24 hr news and public affairs channel, depending on government funding – and I think this if it goes ahead would be hard to compete with, especially given both ABC’s resources and reputation in this field.

    I would probably go with a music type channel here. Video hits has been a pretty long running success for them, so extending it would probably be successful also, not to mention cheap – but it would need other programming to draw audiences – ala Mtv.

  7. I read somewhere (forget where, sorry) that ABC has plans for a news channel which would be ABC4, if they can get the funding for both ABC3 and 4. It’d be a bit like newsradio but on TV I guess. So I don’t think 10 would do a news channel.

  8. My punt on a third channel, is that Ten will launch it’s own news channel to compete with Sky News. Simple as that. 7 cannot launch it’s own, 9 cannot launch it’s own due to their ownership of Sky News.

  9. Personally even though I;m not addicted to sport I’m glad Ten dropped the “same show but in HD” format of the other “new” channels. I’d rather have extra choice in content in SD format rather than the same crappy show in HD. I agree that they should show some other sports content on One when there are broadcasting a sport event on Ten rather then the “turn to Ten” message.

    The IPL cricket should be fun to watch too.

    Good also to see Ten pushing ahead with a third channel – They may as well push ahead to be first to market and try and gain some advantage from that.

  10. I think JB is on the right path

    To segment their audience they need another product to drive the 3rd channel

    Sport (1) and (general / light) entertainment (10) are taken, so a channel that is youth / young adult based sounds plausible. Music plus a MTV/VH1 style of lineup – perhaps shows that are making there way onto SBS (Skins etc).

  13. plans for a third channel- they were supposed to be doing 3 now, although 10HD was mostly a simulcast it broke away for a significant amount of time in it’s hayday and legally they are able to have 3 entirely different stations right now, all of them are, but 10 isn’t doing this for years apparently. and if ONE doesn’t work out for them it will be more than a few years for them to financially recover from that enough to survive let alone launch a third channel.

  14. I’m glad they have Sports Tonight Mon-Fri 7pm. Finally an FTA alternative at 7pm. I don’t think the 3rd channel will be timeshift. I think they’ll see how ONE goes first and then decide which way to go – if they pick up more sports, you may see a 3rd channel which is mixed sports and other shows. Then they could call it ONE TWO on ch 12! Remember there was once only one FOX sports channel. Now there’s 5 of them (3 SD, 1 HD, and news).

  16. @ Richard W

    Highlight shows are just a fiercely fought over as full match broadcasts
    EPL highlights are sewn up for a while if that was your thinking

    HAL & Socceroos would be the best bet when Fox Sports contract expires in a few years, otherwise it’s slim pickings although ESPN / FOX US do have rights to South American leagues and internationals which might be tapped into if Setanta go bust

  17. RE: Ryan: pretty much all major soccer comps and international matches have been eaten up by Fox Sports, ESPN and Setanta Sport.

    I agree that One must pursue at least one major soccer competition/league when the rights are on offer. Soccer crosses all ages and high appeal, so I don’t see why they shouldn’t jump at the chance.

    At least some highlights shows would be good in the meantime though.

  18. It’s pretty useless at the moment when Ten is broadcasting a sport event like the AFL or the Formula One and Channel 12 justs broadcasts a message telling viewers to switch over to Ten. What’s the point of the extra channel if you do that?

  19. ONE HD has a lot going for it and in the fullness of time will be country wide but as for this weekend I’d have to give the F1 coverage a B grade, V8s support races were almost an after thought, pushed to ONE HD. Then at the end of Sunday we here in QLD went back to normal programing at 6pm only to find no news and a Simpsons re-run!!! and the ONE HD coverage only had another 30 minutes to run, including the drivers interviews so after a fantastic first race of the season a lot of viewers didn’t get to hear from the drives who pulled of a great race win for a new team.

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