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Rumour: Don’t mention News 24

Update: The ABC confirms SKY News plays hardball over the channel name "News 24."

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Rumour: TV Tonight hears whispers that the rivalry between SKY News and ABC over the upcoming News channel has seen SKY play hardball over the channel name.

Is it true SKY has delivered a letter to ABC insisting that it has ownership of “News 24” branding and that the channel must only ever be mentioned as ABC News 24?

Instructions are believed to be filtering through ABC ranks that the channel must always be described in its entirety….

It’s gonna get ugly, folks.

Update: The ABC confirmed to Crikey that Sky has “raised concerns with us.”

“The name of the new channel is ABC News 24 and that is what we have been using and will use as the appropriate title,” a spokesperson said.

33 Responses

  1. Well we don’t exactly call ABC1 ‘One’ or abc 2 ‘two. So i wasn’t really ever planning on calling their news chanel just ‘News 24’- it sounds awefully generic. I’ll be sticking to ABCnews24, or ‘abc news channel’.

    I don’t have foxtel, but I whenever at a place that did have it, I always liked flicking over to sky news, and would give it preference over abc news channel.

    Still, having only fta tv, I’m pretty excited I’ll now have access to a 24 hour news channel.

    Sky needs to relax a bit, America has 2 full time news channels- CNN and fox news.

  2. @cjschris: ABC used to show (upscaled) 1080i, before ABC2 was launched. This happened after ABC Kids + FlyTV got shut down (RIP!) and it even rated a mention on CNNNN at the time it started.

  6. Look, no doubt ABC news 24 is gonna be filled with equally embarrassing tech issues. But Jesus, Mary & Joseph — of all the stupid things for sky to pick an argument over.

    How bout u just compete over quality?

    Whoever pads out the best with the least cringeworthy on-air banter wins a gold star!

  8. I’m interested to see how each of the channels refer to each other when using each others footage. The ABC already blow up footage from Sky News to remove the graphics around the edge of the screen will Sky News do the same to the ABC and what will each put on graphics acknowledging where the footage was sourced from. Much more fodder for Media Watch will now be available.

  11. Hysterical.

    I’d be fine with all Sky’s whinging, complaining and carrying-on if they had a decent product themselves. But it’s a shambles. A mess. An amateur operation in every way. They have nothing to be proud of at all, so why are they acting like they are all that?

  14. Has anyone ever seen Sky calling itself ‘News 24’? I thought they called themselves ‘Sky News, Australia’s only 24 hour news service’?

    The ABC will probably just run with ‘News 24.’ I can’t imagine the bad publicity if Sky challenged ‘News 24’ as copyrighted. If all else failed, ABC would probably just brand itself ABC News or ABC 24.

  15. That is unbelievably petty. Sky (and the News Limited papers) are acting like spoilt children, as if the idea of giving their cheap, shoddy channel some competition is somehow totally unfair and they should just be allowed to maintain their monopoly position forever. Grow up.

  17. #ABC24 #ABCnews24 #news24 are all currently used on Twitter to describe ABC’s new 24 hour news channel.

    Sorry SKY, the tweeple have spoken. We’ll call it whatever we like, and we support ABC doing so too.

    Compete on content, not petty crap like this.

  19. Well I don’t think Sky News owns a patent on the words ‘News’ & ’24’ surely?

    It’s a bit sad that they feel so threatened by a channel which hasn’t even started yet that they resort to such tactics – we shall await with interest to how this pans out….

  21. If Sky are so scared of any comptition why don’t they go on to freeview like I have read they do in the UK, after all I do believe that 7 and 9 have both a big stake in Sky so couldn’t they work something out ?

  22. SKY News running scared because a quality competitor is going to nail them to the wall.

    Anyone who saw yesterday’s press conference on the Melbourne Storm on SKY News would have seen audio dropouts, video dropouts, video freezing, anchors talking over the top of the CEO of News Limited, Leigh Hatcher and James Bracey apologising for their awful feed………..

    Bring on News 24…. sorry ABC News 24.

    SKY’s going to get slaughtered.

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