|
|
| After building a network of regional television stations at highly inflated prices during the late 1980s, Prime Television, like numerous other media players of the time, found itself on the edge of receivership in the first part of the 90s. Despite this, the company managed to bounce back with the help of a restructure and improving performance from its programming supplier Seven, to expand further into the Australian television market and eventually overseas.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Ramcorp had spent $200 million assembling the Prime Television Network to take advantage of aggregation and reach an estimated 17% of the Australian population. However, the regional stations that now made up the network had been purchased at highly inflated prices on the basis of similar media purchases by the likes of businessmen such as Alan Bond. This massive start-up cost, plus the $45m cost of expanding those stations to cover entire states for aggregation, left Prime with a serious financial problem at the beginning the 1990s. |
| |
|
|
|
Local productions suffered as a result of the financial strain. The increased advertising revenue from aggregation had not been enough to cover the expense of expanding coverage, and cost-cutting around the stations began to have a deadly effect on local production. A 10-year affiliation deal with the Seven Network was signed in 1990, guaranteeing the availability of networked programming to fill air-time, anytime. By the time aggregation had reached Victoria in 1992, Prime was unable to start broadcasting on time, let alone provide a local news service to regions outside the original Albury market. |
| |
|
|
After accumulated losses of almost $50 million over four years, Ramcorp's name was changed to Prime Television Ltd in August 1991, and a following restructure of the company by Gresham Partners resulted in the first posted profit since aggregation of $7.4 million in 1993.
In the first five years of the decade, Prime used variations of Channel Seven's on-air branding as its own, alongside the slogan "Your Local Station". However, Prime moved away from this in 1995 to develop its own localised campaigns, using video of local people and places and commissioning music to be written for the new slogan "This Is Where We Live.".
Prime purchased a $3.2m license to broadcast a second commercial television station to Mildura in 1996, beginning the following year on UHF-31 in competition with WIN Television. In addition, Prime purchased regional Western Australia broadcaster Golden West Network (GWN) for $71 million in December 1996. |
| |
|
|
| Prime then entered a phase of overseas expansion in 1997, purchasing 34 UHF licenses in New Zealand, and the entire operations of the Nine Network Argentina. The New Zealand licenses were purchased from a Christian broadcasting service for $15 million and commenced transmitting as Prime on 30 August 1998. The Nine Network Argentina was sold to Prime in December 1997 for $250m, however a market crisis in Argentina turned the purchase sour and saw Prime sell its stake only two years later. |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Prime reached an extension on its programming agreement with the Seven Network in 1998, maintaining the revised arrangement for another 10 years from July 1999.
The final "This Is Where We Live." campaign was launched in 1999 with new blue and yellow graphics, however the identifications were replaced by Olympic and New Millennium versions within a few months.
Continue to the 2000s » |
|
 Summer 1
Summer 2
Gold Coast
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| All audio-visual items available for download on this webpage remain copyright of Prime Television. |
| Special thanks to Ian Brash, Andrew Bayley, Evan Davies and Jason Campbell for providing content on this page.
|
|
