Home Shopping infomercials join “Youth” channel GO!
GO! is now screening infomercials with for gut-busting abdominal exercisers instead of episodes of Gossip Girl and The Inbetweeners.
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under Programming
In another sign that Nine is diluting the GO! brand it began broadcasting Home Shopping today at 2am.
Nine had 2 hrs worth of infomercials today, whereas a week ago it played a movie.
The move is seen as a revenue raiser by Nine, as Home Shopping hardly fits with the channel’s pitch as a “youth channel.” Today it was selling gut-busting abdominal exercisers.
The move also effectively deletes late-night replays of youth-friendly shows such as Nip / Tuck, The Inbetweeners, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Gossip Girl.
At the same time, it airs Guthy-Renker Australia on Nine, demonstating a poor commitment to multichanneling options.
7TWO airs vintage AFL matches in the middle of the night.
Several TV Tonight readers have expressed their disappointment by the move, saying:
– It seems to me that the death of multi-channeling has come almost as quickly as it came. Go has become a shadow of it’s former self and it saddens me. In one sense it would have been better to have never experienced the convenience and choice of extra channels. At least without extra channels there’s less chance of having 2 shows on at the same time.
– ….according to the EPG there will no longer be any GO! repeats whatsoever for the 9:30pm or 10:30pm shows. only the 8:30pm shows will get 1 repeat at 1am and the daytime line up does not feature any of the primetime shows at all.
– Everyone who is disgusted by Infomercials coming to GO should jump onto their Facebook page and make your thoughts clear. Several comments already there about the subject.
– Home shopping is pathetic, GO! was the last refuge from this dross and the only decent late night offering on TV. I really hope they reverse this decision asap.
– ….I rely on their Early morning repeats of fringe and terminator because I can’t tape them at 830 pm due to lost!
Correction: TVSN is unrelated to Home Shopping content on GO! Apologies for any confusion.
47 Responses
@ darryn
I’ll give you an out by suggesting you misinterpreted what I meant by “morning”, if not you’ve just caught a nasty case of foot-in-mouth disease.
When initially 7Two started they had Football on every night except one: Wednesday night/Thursday morning. Instead of the football they had the Season 2 of the Mole, followed by…Home Shopping.
They also now have Home Shopping on at 5am every weekday, so that is Home Shopping at the start, and more home shopping hours being added when they cut back the football from 1 match to 2.
So both of my statements were based on fact.
This made me miss Terminator the other night not to mention any other show I would have watched at 2. Some of us are busy at 10.30, Nine executives! It was bad enough that the midday-ish repeats were abandoned now many of the shows I want to watch aren’t repeated at all. To me this was the best thing about GO! now its simply like all the other commercial channels.
This annoys me, I used to record Terminator and Nip/Tuck late at night now I get to see the latest ab flexor infomercial.
GO is starting to suck.
Typical channel 9.
Turning a good channel into a crap channel. Let’s see what we can do to make it crap:
1) Add infomercials
2) Add reality TV
3) Increase the percentage of advertising
Oh, I didn’t realize, they’ve already killed it.
Good one channel Nine – Not!
I was on GO! tonight as I finished watching my recordings and infomercials were on, so I switched to 7 informercials out of spite and turned the machine off, now when I turn it back on it will be on 7 instead of GO!. If they believe in lead-ins so much they should be worried about the effect of people flicking away from their channel instead of flicking towards it like they did last week.
Nines caner has spread to Go! At least Quizmania is a bit more interesting and can generate money for those desperate Ch Nine TV Execs
“Nate says:
April 13, 2010 at 2:02 am
I don’t really care that Go! has added infomercials it was probably inevitable, given 7Two has always had informercials on Thursday morning since they started and more hours of it has slowly popped up.”
This is just an out and out lie and I am calling you on it
bring back the days of quality late nite tv … like “The Mint”, “Midnight Zoo” and “Quizmania” … !!!
lol
(hmm — actually, now i come to think of it, i do miss those wacky shows!!!)
No surprise at all.As i have said plenty of times before the digital channels are just bonus channels that is all……catch up on shows that have not rated on the primary channel,with old shows as well.Don’t expect brand new shows flood the digital channels because it will never happen
I enjoy watching the shows that are on Go more than other channels. I hope it does not change, i also enjoy the music video clips put on in between. I would like to see the name of the artist, so i you like a song you can go get it. There was a song on before weeds came on monday around 10.25pm on the 12th of March, a female artist something about it “goes on and on and on” “gold falling from the sky” I would really like to know who the band and the name of the song, how would i find this out from the free to air tv station GO,
I don’t really care that Go! has added infomercials it was probably inevitable, given 7Two has always had informercials on Thursday morning since they started and more hours of it has slowly popped up.
What I do care about is what they’ve decided to keep from their midnight – 6am schedule and what to drop.
I loved the fact that Go! time-shifted their entire night-time schedule given so many of their good programs clashed with 2 other programs on other channels which made it impossible to DVR the primetime airing.
Now they’ve dropped the repeats of (mostly) new episodes of shows that haven’t been aired in Oz before whilst keeping the repeats of shows that aired 10-20 years ago.
They could’ve easily kept the repeats of their 9.30 and 10.30 shows if they’d ditched their repeats of Seinfeld, Just Shoot Me and Married with Children and dropped the superfluous 4.30 repeat of TMZ – it isn’t like the 12.30 original airing clashes with anything for those people that actually care about the program.
Come on, what do you expect? This is 9 after all, the home of all that is putrid in FTA television.
Watch me disappear from GO, just as I stopped watching 9, many years ago.
I had to go elsewhere to get to see the last seasons of ER, and discovered how not to be tied to someone else’s schedule.
GO = Gone, big surprise.
@Secret Squïrrel: I disagree, I think this website is the perfect place for a survey on informercial viewing. Not just because this place is made up of people who have an interest in tv but also because it attracts a lot of outsiders who come here because the stories turn up on other news sites. This tv website is the only Aussie run tv site I’m aware of.
Lucky that they’re still repeating the 8.30 shows, as I relied on the 1am repeats of Fringe since I was watching Lost on 7TWO.
Saying that though, even if they had scrapped the repeats it now isn’t all that bad as 9 has now provided the online FIXPlay service to catch up on shows.
WTF is this crap, youth channel my a$$ next you tell me there gonna have infomercials during ABC3’s off time.
As a teenager myself and a fan of the GO! brand its pretty shifty of them to add useless things like these infomercials rather than finding new teen shows or maybe those popular reality shows that America is always buzzing about. With this move, there most Definitely will be a decline of young audience i give you that.
@ darryn..72??? nothing really rates on that channel constantly
@Paull: I think that polling the readers (or, perhaps more accurately, the participants) of this site would produce a distorted perspective with respect to the general viewing population, and really only serve to prop up the viewpoint that you have presumably already arrived at.
I think that it’s safe to assume that the advertisers feel that it’s worthwhile paying for the airtime, and that actual audience numbers is irrelevant. Channel Nine don’t care how many people are watching as the airtime has already been paid for. It’s not the same as when they need the numbers in order to attract advertisers to purchase airtime during regular programming.
It should be of no surprise. Go! looked good at the start, until 72 came along and showed how shallow go!’s programming is. Its not even a year old and it is already shown every episode of seinfeld, frasier, bewitched, the nanny, I dream of jeannie etc etc at least 3 times. It doesn’t even get a look in at our place anymore.
It’s time for ABC2 & SBS1 to go 24/7-Eleven already! We need you guys more than ever now! 🙂
As a viewer in ‘WIN Territory,’ they spare us from Nine’s hour long Guthy-Renker Australia programs at 2am & instead replace it with Crawfords Classics (but they let Danoz through the net at 3am). With this in mind, it’s time for WIN to step in with GO’s graveyard schedule & simply continue with the prime-time repeats between 2am & 4am. Knowing they still insert national ads from Wollongong HQ at this time, it should be easy from them to do, no?
Please WIN! Regional shift workers & insomniacs (like me) need you to over-ride Nine.
And for those who miss the early endless hours, 7TWO now has “Shopping” from 5am! For those 2 or 3 who actually watch…thought you wouldn’t want to miss an extra hour.
May I ask, does anyone actually watch infomercials? Do you do shift work and have them on at night?
David, is it possible to do a poll on this site asking how many people watch infomercials, because I’d be interested to see if they actually do get viewers. I’m particularly interested in late night infomercials, not the ones that
come on during morning shows such as mornings with kak.