Right now we don’t watch much FTA TV because the digital reception is pathetic and the “analogue reception” if that is what you call it is not much better. The only consistently decent recption we can get is through satelite tv, in our case austar which at the moment does not show any fta tv other than some sbs & abc.

So who cares if its local or not just some viewable quality reception would be good..but maybe i misread this because i find it hard to believe something might actually be done by the Govt to provide a fix for our tv reception woes, so when the switchover comes for us it will be more like a switch off.

If you think local news will be compromised by having state-specific channels, then you mustn’t know how the current satellite situation deals with it. State-specific channels will increase the localised news for those areas. Rural residents in parts of Victoria, NSW and Tasmania suffer with just Queensland and Darwin news. SCTV and Imparja try to offer some service, but it’s just too big of an area to offer anything local.

The other reason many people choose to ignore is the financial viability of a metro commercial network owning & operating all the stations their programming is currently screening on. For pretty much the same reason why you don’t see a David Jones store in every little town & major regional city throughout Australia, it will cost them more money to run than gains from local advertising revenue.

I remember last year PBL-Nine wanted to off-load Nine Darwin to Imparja but it only fell through because Imparja couldn’t secure the loan to buy the station. Also, PBL-Nine didn’t put up a bid at all when Southern Cross Broadcasting was selling Nine Adelaide, thus letting WIN Corp take it on. So, apart from the Seven Network owning their regional Queensland stations & PBL-Nine operating NBN in Newcastle, I don’t see much desire on their behalf to extend their reach much further than that. It’s not even profitable for the existing regional networks to operate in many of the areas they do now, but because of Hawke Government policy, that’s imposed on them. Why do people living in ‘Wop Wop’ think they deserve the same goods & services that capital city residents receive?

As much as it’s important to know what happens in the state and across Australia, so too the local region. SBS covers the world pretty damn well.

If there’s a small group with digital them do the satellite or discount their ISP for streamed news – not that difficult

Honestly if you have a broadcast license in this country you should be required to throw together at least 15 mins of local news per day (I’m basing that on your regular metro ch 7/9 half hour bulletin would be 50% local 25% national and 25% international)

It annoys me that “regional broadcasters” (the head offices of all you will probably locate in Sydney mind you!) start threatening news cuts when clearly only one of them is putting any sort of money into news at all!

This sort of proposal has bigger implications for advertising (anyone whose watched Imparja/Seven Central from the Victorian Surf Coast can attest to this) but one satellite net for each state is a vast improvement – the only thing that would make it better is if they make the sattelite service the metro station! You watch the take-up of satellite dishes as people ditch the second rate regional service.

Praise the lord Finally something that makes sense, i could not give a rats arse about the local one hour news bulletin, I’d gladly watch Sydeny news if it meant i had a decent reception. Fingers crossed, cause right now our digital is a joke.

Can’t they make Nine, Seven and Ten national?

They should have state based local news everynight.