Spartacus fights for GO!
Les Sampson, the man behind GO!, tells TV Tonight why he is so excited by the Spartacus premiere and what the channel has learned in its first year.
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Spartacus: Blood and Sand is set to become the new flagship show for GO! when it has its Australian premiere tomorrow night.
The US cable series, featuring Australian Andy Whitfield as the leader of the Roman slaves, has been a hit series for the Starz Network and attracted buzz for its buff gladiators, gory violence, CGI special effects and sex scenes. It is the kind of alternative viewing that Nine’s Director of Acquisitions and HD Channel, Les Sampson, calls a perfect fit.
“It’s got action, sex appeal, it’s the brand of the channel. It’s a mega series,” he told TV Tonight.
“And the great thing is there’s an Australian in the lead, and another in Season Two and it’s shot in our region as well. So it’s got some good breeding!”
Since launching a year ago, GO! quickly established itself as the leading multichannel.
“We’ve won every week in 16-39, 18-49, 24-54 and Total People. We’re very much focussed on the 14-39 demo and giving complementary programming to the premium channel. So we’ve met all the targets which is great.
“We’re also very focussed on a 24 hour schedule which is so important in a multichannel environment.
“The premium channel is focussed on the 25-54 demos so it gives our sales team a great product to go to market and sell.”
Sampson says there have been lessons learned along the way, and that the infant channel is still undergoing change.
“This channel has grown from Day One. Every single day we’ve learned something different about how the channel performs.
“For example, we thought Music would be a great fit. And it is an important part of the channel but everybody’s taste is different,” he says.
“We found with Music Programming it didn’t deliver the eyeballs. People found their music in other forms rather than just on television.
“We also learned what shows were successful. Comedy shows did extremely well. Sci Fi and Movies have done very well. So we’ve learned as we go through the process what the audience likes and what the audience doesn’t like.”
With its Pay TV-model of block programming in the Daytime, the channellaunched in August 2009 with its hottest titles in primetime: The Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Fringe and The Hills.
More recently some key titles have seen their timeslots replaced by movies, reruns of The Big Bang Theory, Top Gear with midnight starting times for some shows such as Chuck.
“I was very disappointed with Chuck on GO!” says Sampson.
“The issue we had was that it had already been played quite a lot on Foxtel and there was DVD access as well. As a result it didn’t deliver. So we reacted to the audience, and the audience wasn’t there.
“I don’t want to pull things off the schedule, but we’ll move things around.”
Rights for the second series won’t become available until 2011. Sampson also responded to numerous timechanges for Gossip Girl.
“In Sydney where the penetration of Foxtel is a lot higher a lot more people have seen Gossip Girl, particularly Seasons 1 and 2 which are doing very strong numbers on iTunes.”
But GO! will launch Season Three of Gossip Girl within the next two weeks, ahead of the DVD release in early December.
“Every show I put on the schedule I’m hoping it will deliver solid numbers. I don’t put any show on the schedule unless I have real passion it will do solid numbers. If it doesn’t I guess I have to swallow my pride and find a better spot for it.”
As a national signal channel, there are also restrictions on replays of M and MA related content during the daytimes during school holidays. There have been 9 weeks of school holidays across Australia during May – July.
“So we can’t do our catch-up element during the Daytime in that area. But when we are outside School Holiday restrictions we’ll do catch-up.”
Sampson says the youth audience for GO! is tapped into the online community and he defends late programming changes are quickly understood via Twitter, Facebook and social networking sites.
“If we do a programme change in the morning they would know within a period of about an hour that we’ve done the change. That’s one thing which is great about the 14-39 demos they are media savvy, tech-savvy and have a massive appetite for content,” he says.
Despite negative feedback on it own website that suggests otherwise, Sampson says the audience has reportedly given positive feedback to the idea of late night timeslots for some of its key titles.
“People are saying ‘We love the fact you’re playing it at midnight because we want to watch something else at 8:30,” he says.
“We want to at all times maintain first-run content. I said at the launch we aim to have 10 or 11 first-run shows in primetime, which we continue to aim to do, unlike Foxtel where most of the channels consist of repeat content.
“At least 10 or 11 shows in primetime are first run, and that includes Movies.
“On average 2-3 per week are Free to Air first runs.”
GO! plans to also fastrack The Vampire Diaries and Hellcats soon as the US Fall season gets underway.
44 Responses
@Leigh, are you Leigh Sales by any chance, hehehe… watching Go! after Lateline I suppose 🙂
Programming updates for GO are on this and other websites long before they appear on GO’s own web site or their own Facebook page. in fact – what I have seen – more often than not – is that updates are posted on the Facebook page by regular people and not GO themselves.
If GO are saying that social media is an integral part of their communcation with their audience for programming and updates, then they need to do a better job of it. Maybe have one person who’s job it is to get GO updates out there, everywhere they can.
Better yet – maintain a stable program that doesn’t change erratically.
Good point.
Apparently I was the only person watching Chuck….
I am one of the people who enjoys watching shows at midnight – having said that I would prefer to have the option of watching at 8:30 or midnight (as the schedule used to be).
I wish GO! could get Supernatural from 10 and Smallville too. They’d screen it better than 10 since they no longer have their 10HD channel to offload shows onto.
the thing i don’t get is why can’t a 10:30 show just stay at 10:30. surely they are not that competitive that they would screw over fans of shows and cop so many complaints just for what would be a few thousdand viewers.
talk about dodging the question re: gossip girl. sure there may not be a big audience for it because of itunes and foxtel. but why does that mean there has to be programming changes every week with 8 hours notice and moving from double ER 10:30>11:30>week off>10:30>week off>11:30>midnight>1am. now back to Mon10:30.
i think we know the answer, it’s because there were some close weeks and 9 were getting desperate to get their noses over the line first. but it would have been nice to see Les own it instead of making up this spin.
Mr Sampson, not everyone under 40 is happy or even attempting to keep up with the constant last-minute changes from GO’s dart-board programming strategy. We’re not all glued to Twitter or Facebook to keep up with when TBBT will next override a previously scheduled or advertised program.
The 9.30 movies I don’t altogether dislike, some have been good to watch.
And I love Seinfeld but even I’m not going to sit through a four-episode block of re-runs!
And kill the infomercials, I had the misfortune of seeing TV at 2am the other morning. Infomercials on both Go and Nine. Surely one channel could at least offer an alternative instead of playing two different infomercials!
So because the audience are tech-savvy are will be more likely to know about changes then that means changes are OK? Perhaps he should also be aware that if they are tech-savvy then they are likely to know where else to go to get content.
And I’d like to know exactly who likes to watch new shows at midnight. Because I sure don’t know anyone!
Go! has become a shadow of its former self. Its constant programming changes, drop in quality content and increase in repeats has just made it Nine’s dumping ground
Really good article.
It’s good to see GO! admit to their mistake with Gossip Girl and Chuck.
I would still like to see some more shows brought in, especially if its shows you can’t get on DVD.
what’s with all the hate?
sure some of the tv shows are airing 1-2 years late, but if you really like the show and are a fan you would buy the dvd’s or get it by other means and not wait for it to by played on GO! and then start complaining
one problem with GO! would be not sticking with a show after airing it. Although understandable if its not rating well, sticking it in a later timeslot works especially if you want to record it then watch it later
the movies being played everyday at the moment i find it to be a good thing as it breaks up from the constant 30min/1hr tv shows
also The King of Queens. anyone remember that show? is the network still able to air that show because it would be cool if they did ha!
would be nice to bring back some other comidies other than green acres
How about MTM or Liverne and Shirley GO
@PD: Exactly! Thanks for the support.
@chk chk – people watch a few different shows a day, doesn’t mean they change their shirt as often 😉
“We’re also very focussed on a 24 hour schedule which is so important in a multichannel environment.”
Yet they have infomercials????
Its all spin and PR from this guy.
@chk chk
Yeah, but nobody buys a shirt, lets somebody else wear it for a couple of years, before taking it back, putting it on and then complaining that they’re “nice new shirt” hasn’t made the good impression they were hoping for.
@tomothy
Just think of it as, how many new shirts can you wear on a given day? Just because you got now clothes doesn’t mean that you get to wear all of them all at once, you need to plan as to when to wear them and if the right occasion calls for it.
What kind of programming decision is playing stuff later on because people say “We love the fact you are playing at midnight because we want to watch something else at 8:30” isn’t it his job to convince them to watch his network at 8:30??
““I was very disappointed with Chuck on GO!” says Sampson.”
“…people have seen Gossip Girl, particularly Seasons 1 and 2 ”
Yes, this is because these shows are up to three years old now, of course people have seen then if they have had other means including legal download, DVD and Foxtel. If Nine had aired them when they first had the rights, they wouldn’t have had this problem, and current content could be shown on GO! There are bound to be a few summer shows in the US now which could have been fasttracked.
Cool and groovy! I can’t wait to watch Spartacus (again)!
I just hope Go! doesn’t edit out too much of the blood, violence, sex and/or nudity.
Is Chuck even on? I’d already purchased season 1 on DVD from the US, so I was just waiting for them to start showing season 2 onwards, but I definitely would have been interested in viewing the remainder of the series.
Oh I forgot to add, what happened to ‘The Listener’ I know it didn’t last too long in the US but they showed the pilot here back in March and then nothing!
And what none of the FTA channels have learnt is that many people want High Definition.
Les Sampson “The issue we had was that it had already been played quite a lot on Foxtel and there was DVD access as well. As a result it didn’t deliver. So we reacted to the audience, and the audience wasn’t there.”
That’s what you get for sitting on programing for so long!
I thought GO was great, until the infomercials started.
Like Spartacus he just goes by the one name of Sampson? Cool!