WIN threatens to walk away from Nine

8Aug07

Owner of regional network WIN Television, Bruce Gordon, has renewed his threat to dump the group’s affiliation with the Nine Network in the lead-up to negotiations over a new program supply deal.

Mr Gordon said WIN could obtain programs itself if the two companies failed to come to an agreement.

“We’re out of contract and they keep threatening to turn us off,” Mr Gordon told the Sydney Morning Herald. “We said, ‘Go ahead: take your programming off’, and we think it would be a lot of fun if they did. We can program this network. When I bought this network in 1979, there were no affiliation agreements.”

Negotiations were due to be resumed this morning after stalling in June.

PBL Media, owner of Nine, wants WIN to pay 40 per cent of its revenue in return for programming, up from the 32 per cent it pays under the current agreement, which officially expired on July 1.

Mr Gordon wants the fees reduced to reflect poor ratings and to bring them into line with the 29 per cent of revenue that WIN’s main regional competitors, Prime and Southern Cross Broadcasting, pay their partners at Seven and Ten.

“Affiliation fees could come to somewhere in the area of $170 million for our group, and that on a 10-year period is $1.7 billion if we were to pay it, but we are certainly not going to,” Mr Gordon said.

The 78-year-old, who divides his time between Bermuda and Wollongong, headed Paramount Pictures’s international television sales division for 23 years and says he knows “a thing or two about programming”.

He said Nine had made some “ridiculous” programming decisions over the past year, including replacing a popular US soap opera, The Young and The Restless, with a daytime chat show, The Catch-Up, which was axed in June, and airing the late-night show Quizmania.

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