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Nine’s new channel by September

Nine's new youth channel will launch by September, with David Gyngell vowing to resign if it can't double ONE HD's share by the end of year.

nine network 09Nine will launch its new youth-driven channel by September.

In an interview with The Australian, CEO David Gyngell has thrown down the gauntlet to TEN’s sports-channel, ONE HD, offering to resign if his new channel doesn’t double the audience share of ONE by the end of the year.

That means it needs to rate close to a 3 per cent share to keep him in his job.

The channel, rumoured to be named Go! is being created with a swag of programs Nine acquired through its new $500 million output deal with Warner Bros.

“I’ll give this job away if it doesn’t do double the job of ONE,” Mr Gyngell said.

“ONE is the red-haired stepchild of sports rights,” he said. “It’s the stuff that no one wants.”

(Apologies to all red heads and step-children everywhere obviously….)

The article notes that Gyngell also flagged massive changes in the free-to-air landscape over the next year because of multi-channelling, online streaming and downloading, time-shifted viewing on digital video recorders and even mobile. It follows a reluctance to move toward a secondary channel, which he described as a ‘tax’ on the industry during a time of global recession.

Ninemsn will launch a streaming video website that will make more than 1700 hours of video clips and TV shows available on demand on July 14th.

“Within a year you won’t be able to look at ratings and judge a program in the same way,” he said. “One show will have to be monetised four times.”

“You don’t have to protect the free-to-air space,” he said. “We have to extend it and grow it.”

He even admitted Nine would lose some audience from its main channel because of cannibalisation from its new digital channel. But, he said, free-to-air rivals Seven and TEN would also be affected, and the two Nine channels combined would gain audience share and therefore advertising share.

Some of the titles previously touted for the new channel include Gossip Girl, Entourage and Sex and the City.

Despite reports it would indicate its future back in March, Seven has still not declared its hand on its new channel except to confirm it has settled on a model. We wait with bated breath…

Source: The Australian.

61 Responses

  1. These channels should be available all over Australia, if the studios can get the “main” channels veiwed all over the country, then they need to sort it out and make it so all of Oz can veiw the new channels!!!

  2. Some shows on GO! are good but what I really want to know is that since my building can’t get foxtel why can’t they run a subscription service online so everybody can access it. I also want to know why we can’t watch shows online from NBC and the other major US networks. People living overseas are no threat to their market-share and even if they charged a subscription I would gladly pay it as I pay for access to Major League Baseball already.

  3. So which channel will pick up the new series of 90210… just two episodes shown on 10… does that mean they don’t want it or are saving it for ‘good’…

  4. Nine has no plans to introduce G0!99 in Darwin. I have no source to back it up but because Darwin is a regional area, GO!99 will probably never come to Darwin at all.

  5. I think Seven was sitting back and waiting to see what Nine did. And now they know what Nine is doing, and Nine has made it clear they are serious about this new network, I expect Seven will do their best to one up Nine.

    The Seven/Nine – Leckie/Gyngell rivalry is fierce. I expect Seven to attack Nine head on. I have a feeling Seven will launch 2 new SD channels as soon as they can.

    I also have a feeling Seven’s new channel with have a strong focus on factual. They own all the repeat rights to their huge factual library – and we have seen with Border Security that repeats rate huge – almost as well as originals. There is also an abundance of factual programming out there from Nat Geo, BBC, TruTV in the US and more.

    I expect it to be mixed with things like Family Guy, Stargate and King of the Hill

  6. You have to ask yourself, why didn’t the commercial networks make more of their HD channels. although Ten did, and at the same time they didn’t really provide a second sd channel with alternate programming, or am i missing something here?

  7. jakevin: a combined music/reality channel would be good for Seven, because it differs from their slightly older-skewed main channel. Lifestyle shows make a up a lot of Seven’s archive tho, and we also can’t discount them bringing Sky News to Freeview (although Nine as one of Sky News’ co-owners would presumably prevent this from happening in Seven’s slot).

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