Thursday, November 22, 2007

A Media Buyers Dream?

The telly here is properly shocking. Saturday night, prime time between 8.30 and 9.30? That’ll be The Bill. One of the other channels is doing a Stars Wars season an’all, so on a Saturday in the run up to Christmas we can enjoy Empire Strikes Back, with Jedi next week. It doesn’t get much better during the week either, apart from the odd yank show like CSI or Without A Trace. But what’s interesting on the big American shows is that they stretch them out for 70 minutes with four breaks in each, as well as plenty of sponsorship and huge amount of ads between the shows. Interesting in a drives-you-mental way, natch, making their version of Sky+ (called Foxtel IQ, it’s got the same remote and everything) an essential purchase when we move into our own drum.

Channel Ten are also ‘going big’ on the fact that they’re just got the rights to show repeats of Friends. Every break you get a “coming soon to Ten – Friends!” like it was a new series or summat. Fair dos they probably haven’t had the chance to see it on E4 every night for the last hundred years, but still.
Oh aye, and one of the highest rating shows here (The Chasers, it’s a comedy thing taking the piss out of the media and current affairs) blows away the competition by getting a mahoosive 1.6m viewers a week! It’s on the ABC, which is like the BBC but with adverts, and there was some quote in the paper from one of the TV heads the other day saying something like ‘there isn’t a commercial show out there who wouldn't sell their grandmother for viewing figures like that…’

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