When England's home Tests were on Channel 4, they used to cut to horse racing on Saturday afternoons. The cricket was put on to Film4 then so we didn't miss any of it. You needed a set top box though. Do Channel 9 do anything similar?
They don't do anything similar because the laws are quite different here, the closest thing that could be done under the current laws is to show the Christmas thing on the High Definition channel and the cricket on the analogue and Standard Definition channels.
To explain a bit further, Australian commercial networks are required to do: a) An analogue channel, b) A SD Channel showing the same content as the HD channel, c) A HD channel showing either the same content as a and b, or a 'demonstration loop', which is essentially fancy nature scenes to show off HD.
At the start of this year commercial networks were granted the ability to do HD Multicasting, which meant that c was extended to showing either the same content as a and b or different content. But the catch is, sporting events on the anti-siphoning list (the thing that prevents everything being shown on subscription television), which includes all international ODI and Test matches played in Australia, the Ashes in both Australia and England, AFL and NRL, The Olympics and a bunch of other stuff, aren't allowed to be shown on a Multi-channel unless they have been shown on SD/Analogue first or at the same time.
So basically that means that you can show other stuff on HD during sport, but you can't do vice-versa (in most cases), and considering Nine Adelaide take a lot of pride in their 'local community events' they were always going to show it over the cricket.
As for SD, in 2009 the commercial networks will get the same rights that ABC and SBS currently have to have more than one SD channel, but the requirement to show anti-siphoning list sport on analogue will mean that they won't be able to just put the cricket off to a different channel until analogue is switched off (2010 at the earliest, 2012 at the latest for the process to begin).
There is however an exception that hasn't been taken advantage of, for news programming only, _any_ sporting coverage can be moved to a multichannel, so when the cricket is still going but they go off to the news, legally they can keep showing the cricket on another channel.
In practice none of this will happen, the move to High Definition sport will mean that there won't be alternate content on HD during sport, the Twenty20 cricket will be shown in HD on Nine this year and Ten do about half their sport in HD (though if you live outside the main 5 capital cities you won't get any, yet). In 2009, SD multichannelling will be restricted by a lack of bandwidth (ABC are the only ones who do somewhat decent HD and two SD channels at once, but they are going to add a third SD channel in the next year or so, ABC3), especially during sport (where more bandwidth is needed for HD) where they will probably have to be turned off altogether (which defeats the purpose), and Foxtel (the equivalent of SKY for Australia) are fighting against any relaxation of the laws.
Some technical explanatory notes:
Note the difference between Multi
casting and Multi
channelling, you might have seen the ads for Ten HD and Seven HD, those are promoting Multicasting, which is essentially slight variances of programming on what is essentially the same channel, ABC2 is a Multichannel, as it is permanently different from ABC TV.
SD and HD are both broadcast over the air here (terrestrially) as opposed to the UK where you need pay-TV or FreeSat to get HD. The problem is to have decent HD you lose any chance of doing SD multichanneling (for MPEG2 that is) at decent quality, ABC and SBS sacrifice HD, though ABC HD is on par with Seven.
/long and excessively technical answer to minor question.
Short and simple answer:
When England's home Tests were on Channel 4, they used to cut to horse racing on Saturday afternoons. The cricket was put on to Film4 then so we didn't miss any of it. You needed a set top box though. Do Channel 9 do anything similar?
Government stupidity means that isn't possible here.
Nine Adelaide's about to become WIN also.
Not quite, they are owned by WIN, but will continue to be Nine for the foreseeable future. Besides they wouldn't call Nine Adelaide WIN, because WIN in South Eastern SA, is now a Channel Seven affiliate (which means they show mostly Seven shows rather than Nine ones)
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Reps for that!
