Go! A new beginning?

Go! can be found at channel 99 if your TV is digital-enabled
Broadcasting commences on 9 August 2009

This revolution will be televised

Tucked away in the media pages of many newspapers and websites recently was an announcement that might see a revolution in the way we watch television. The press release from the Nine Network announced the launch of its new digital channel, jauntily titled GO!, promises to bring “the young, and young at heart, more choice and entertainment than ever before”. Hmmm…

Anyhow, Go is the latest instalment in the commercial networks’ ongoing battle to come to grips with the digital revolution.

To put this into context, let’s go back a few years. With advances in technology, the writing was already on the wall for analogue television by the late 1990s. Trouble was most people had an analogue TV, so to bring digital TV online needed a lengthy implementation period. The change-over proved more troublesome than expected, so that the initial 2010 date for analogue switch-off has been pushed back to late 2013 (although some areas will begin switching to digital-only from early 2010).

Anyhow, the commercial broadcasters had trouble coming to grips with this new technology and what it could offer them. Pay TV had already recognised the potential that digital’s far superior bandwidth and functionality could offer, and was busily developing and broadcasting ever more channels for its subscribers. The networks however initially wanted to go a different direction – bringing their regular programming to viewers in a high-definition format.

Let’s just stop for a moment and consider that. They wanted to broadcast the same shows in a bright new format. Do you think that high-def would make the dialogue on Neighbours any more believable; or improve the acting on Home and Away? No, of course not. The idea seems to have been simply to not emulate what the pay television operators were doing.

Slowly, it’s dawned on the networks that the idea of showing the same tired stuff in a shiny new format was a recipe for disaster. So they’re now moving to new models of digital TV offerings. Seven and Nine both developed HD versions of themselves (i.e. the original plan) but they essentially show the same material as their standard channels.

Ten broke ranks and made the bold step (after a couple of misfires) of launching One HD, a sports-only channel. That project has been a bit hit-and-miss probably due to the fact that a lot of sports content is already tied up between its free-to-air rivals and pay TV. Still, if you like lots of golf, you’d be loving it.

The ABC (again, after a couple of misfires) launched ABC2. Aunty took the even braver step of using the new HD channel to show material that it would have shown on its main channel, but at a different time. What this meant was that, if you didn’t particularly want to be watching say Australian Story, you could flick over to ABC2 and get a dose of Red Dwarf repeats. OK, maybe I’m being a bit flippant there, but the idea is that ABC2 isn’t simply mimicking the parent network; it’s providing viewers with an alternative to the parent network.

Vampire Diaries preview

This brings us to Nine and Go. Regular readers of these pages will appreciate that Nine is often the subject of more than a little wr ath on my part over the way it treats quality shows that don’t really “fit” the stereotypical Nine demographic. The list of these shows is too long to mention but includes stuff like Weeds, The Wire, Fringe and many more. These shows, which are a bit “out there” or are slightly “harder going” than your regular prime-time fare (and which, consequently, garner lower ratings) have been shuffled off to the oblivion of late-night or simply dropped altogether – much to the chagrin of thousands who had embraced them before the axe fell.

Now it looks like Nine has a solution – they’re going to be shown on Go; which seems like a win-win for all concerned. Fans get their shows back; while Nine can concentrate its marketing resources on the “hit” shows in prime-time.

So far, the programs announced for Go include Gossip Girl, Fringe, CSI (maybe repeats, maybe new eps) and The Hills. There will also be repeats of Seinfeld and a sizeable smattering of “reality” fare like The Bachelor, Survivor and Hell’s Kitchen. Probably Go’s biggest coup to date (and bearing in mind it doesn’t even launch until August 9) is that it will air the hit US series The Vampire Diaries. Tapping into the Twilight phenomenon, The Vampire Diaries has only just debuted in the US and shows signs of being a winner. Another show on Go that could be worth a look is Aliens in America, about a Moslem boy sent to live with a Christian family in middle-America.

I’m certainly hoping Go helps to redress some of the ill-will generated among viewers (particularly younger viewers) by some of Nine’s programming decisions. And let’s all hope it signals the start of a more adventurous era of programming across all the networks.

Phil James

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