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Sunday Arts gravitates to online

Speculation today that ABC's Sunday Arts show is to undergo change which sees more content online, potentially at the expense of on-air.

saThe Age reports today that ABC’s Sunday Arts program is set to undergo changes including reducing it from 60 to 30 minutes and shifting some of its content from on-air to online.

According to the article executive producer, Greg Dee, refused to confirm the plan, saying only that the ABC’s arts programming was ”evolving” but confirming that the ABC would be significantly expanding the amount of arts content it carried online.

”We’ve been developing for about a year and a half what we’ve been calling an ‘arts gateway’ online. Every artist in Australia and every arts lover in Australia will have access to that,” Mr Dee said.

The Sunday afternoon show, which airs from 5-6pm with Michael Veitch, Virginia Trioli and Fenella Kernebone hasn’t pulled a big audience for some time, but it does land some decent international guests. In August it had 186,000 for one of its better shows.

One source told the newspaper: ”This show is a kind of dinosaur, one of the few still produced in-house and [ABC management] don’t like that. They can’t outsource it because it’s not financially viable, but they can’t drop it as they’re bound by the charter to provide arts programming.”

Earlier this year ABC chose not to renew The Einstein Factor after 6 years promising the fundng would be channelled into drama production.

Source: The Age

6 Responses

  1. Stan:
    Their iView service has been offering exclusive cartoon series for over a year, which could have easily been shown on the ABC1/2 anytime, instead of the frequent repeats of other series. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ABC only bought online rights to those exclusive cartoon series on iView, since an online focus has been mentioned in several previous new reports.

    The majority of the current kids programming on the ABC1/2 is actually repeats, and I don’t expect the ABC3 will make much difference. The current kids programming doesn’t offer much, outside of preschoolers, and other kids who don’t mind endless repeats.

  2. The thing is, Sunday arts is the only magazine arts show on TV. That means if you have a current art event you cant get TV covergage without a program like this. I cant beleive they are considering this. I think it would be a failure of ABC’s service to the community.

    Why put it online? wil they be spending the same amount of money on production? If so then just air the whole thing, it cant hurt. If they arnt spending as much on production that is just selling short the arts community and viewers like me that like to learn about what people are doing or get inspired by others creativity.

    I think most people’s 80 year old grandparents dont know what iview is. My dad is a painter and has never been on the ionternet in his life. He wont be able to watch any of this online content.

    ABC1 is still the primery access to the broadcaster and therefore this show must stay, intact.

  3. Yes my 80-something Sunday Arts loving grandparents are going to be checking the show out on iView For Sure.

    I agreed with Mike Retter, it’s the kind of service that surely the ABC is there to provide.

    What is the point of having three channels and then putting so much content on the net? I was annoyed enough when the end of Hungry Beast turned into a plug for their website.

  4. Don’t worry, Kirben! I’m sure as they open up ABC2 to further kids programming on top of all the hours & hours of kids stuff on ABC1 & ABC3, you’ll find what’s on iView now will be on-air soon.

    ‘Your ABC… If you’re a kid.’

  5. Thats awful! They cant cut that show in half! I think its an insult to take half the show away from the public. What about people without broadband? Thats just taking away. The ABC must keep this show in tact because it performs an important service to the community. It serves far better than many other costly government funded arts projects and has bigger coverage.

    by all means make more online material but dont take away from those that dont have broadband.

    Offensive!

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