News just announced that TVNZ 7 flagship programme Media 7, hosted by Russell Brown will move to TV3 and become Media 3 is welcome, but does does not fill the vacuum of public television broadcasting once TVNZ7 gets the axe on 30 June.
The Top Shelf-produced programme examining local media will move to TV3 on Saturday mornings in August with an encore screening late on Sunday evenings. It will also be available on-demand at tv3.co.nz.
There is speculation that an announcement is imminent around Back Benches being hosted by either TV3 or Sky (on Prime). Keeping the Back Benches and Media 7 formats are good news but the fact remains they’ll be delievred in a commercial environment, with associated commercial pressures. And it’s no replacement for public broadcasting.
Are we not supposed to hate on TV3 since they were bailed out by National with a dodgy deal?
So we don’t need to save TVNZ 7 after all. Yay.
“Are we not supposed to hate on TV3 since they were bailed out by National with a dodgy deal?”
Indeed, but at least John Campbell (election night show aside) still fights a good, fair fight.
If media 7 and Back benches do both make it out of tvnz 7 alive, then that’s a couple of more bits of wheat to balance the political chaff ratio in mediaworks ‘empire’.
Doesn’t matter where quality resides… It’s still quality.
Besides, even with the freeview con, it’s not like we’ve got plenty of tv stations.
Closing TVNZ7 and putting some of it’s programmes on commercial networks seems like closing the Louvre Museum and putting the Mona Lisa on display at a local MuckDonalds.