*pokes American TV with curiosity*

[zahri_melitor]

I have questions. Your television does not make my kind of sense, but then I live in the nice world of 5 channels, plus digital miscellanary.

Firstly, how many channels do you actually have? Free to air ones?

Could anyone give me a link to a readable TV guide for a day that I could look at?

Does your evening TV really start and run on the hour?

Comments

[zahri_melitor]

Ta muchly.

I tend to look on cable TV with suspicion, but then, despite massive advertising campaigns, the TV execs haven't yet managed to get pay-TV penetration to more than 25% yet in Australia.

On the starting times - with ABC, anything is possible. Time Team, for instance, starts at 6.09pm on a Tuesday. And it generally does start at 6.09, unless it starts at 6.07. The ABC has no ads, see, and run a lot of children's programs during the day - they manage to keep on the five minute interval in the evenings, and it's usually almost still in basic half hour, 40 minute or hour blocks.

7, 9, 10 and SBS all have ads (boo hiss to SBS - they need to get rid of them again). Half hour programs pretty much all are listed to start on the hour or half hour. Hour long programs, during the day, start on the hour. In the evenings, hour long programs start on the half hour. Basically, from 7.30pm onwards.

Our main news runs before Prime Time, at 5pm for 10, 6pm for 7 & 9, 6.30 for SBS and 7pm for ABC. An additional late news runs at 10.30 on ABC and 10.

10.30 is when the decent shows end. 11.20 is holiday bedtime on a weekend, watching something involving fast cars, explosions and hot chicks. 11 seems exotic and very, very late to have a news program.

[aggiebell90]

We usually have news (here at least) at 5,6, and 10 (except for on weekends, when they usually cut the 5:00 news). Your ABC sounds like our PBS -- there's no ads shown there, either, unless it's a quicky preview of some show coming up soon. But you have to deal with the horrible fund drive once a year on PBS.

Our decent shows end at 10:00/11:00 depending on where you are in the country. And part of why we have news on so late is because lots of people have really insane hour (or two hour) commutes and miss the earlier news shows.

A show starting at 6:09 (or 6:07) makes me boggle. :)

[zahri_melitor]

Well, ABC and SBS (Australian Broadcasting Commission and Special Broadcasting Service) are government funded. So, yeah, no ads, (though SBS now has them to provide extra funding) but they come out of the federal government budget. But they're not accountable to the government, mostly, and are where you actually get the least biased information and coverage of issues. (I mean, they have The Chasers War on Everything on ABC. Which you may actually have heard of, because they got Hillary Clinton this week, and she responded.)

A fund drive sounds like hell. They don't really do those over here - Melbourne has TV stuff during the Red Shield Appeal (annual doorknock for the Salvation Army - they usually manage to 'do' at least 2/3 of houses in suburban areas over the weekend), but yours sounds much more annoying. Otherwise, I think the nearest thing is possibly Carols by Candlelight or Carols in the Domain, and they're much more outdoor christmas carols concerts shown live that happen to feature occasional donation plugs for Vision Australia and the Salvos, respectively. Most people regard Carols as a nice tradition.

SBS is special. They show weird stuff. TV News in 12 different languages (they do radio news in 68). The stereotypical shows are lots of soccer (seriously. The network's other name is Soccer Bloody Soccer), subtitled tv shows (Mostly European and East Asian), shows with cult followings (Mythbusters, Top Gear) and really good documentaries.

When I think about the commute thing, yeah, it makes sense. We don't worry so much about it for news because you can pretty much watch news from 5pm straight through to 7.30pm by channel hopping. Any new news that is broadcast at 10.30pm is any morning emergencies in the US or midafternoon issues in Europe. Which is why most Australians will tell you they didn't hear about XYZ terrorist attack or natural disaster until first thing the next morning - they keep happening after our news and watched TV end.

I will admit 6.09 is a weird sounding time. But you have to fit Behind the News in before it, after Rollercoaster signs out for the day (Behind the News - kids news program, talking about usually a single current issue that's been in the media and explaining it at a clear, concise, Year 3 level. It's been running in one form or another since forever).