KEY POINTS:
TV3 morning show presenter Oliver Driver and his ALT TV partners are walking away from the grungey music channel.
TV sources say that while the tiny Sky pay channel has struggled financially ALT TV should survive and also be shown on the free-to-air digital platform Freeview. It's unclear how new owners could cover those overheads.
Driver and the three other 25 per cent shareholders - founder Thane Kirby, Ricky Newby and former Sky Entertainment corporate boss David Kennedy - have been negotiating with another unnamed party.
Kennedy said the outcome may be clearer today but the current regime is on the way out.
Driver, an actor and director, was ALT TV's "creative director" and as a media face ensured it won publicity.
Stunts like the topless weather presenter gave the channel a profile well above its audience numbers. Driver - a confident thespian beloved by the arts set and an arch critic of mainstream media - became co-presenter of TV3's low rating breakfast show Sunrise.
Now Driver is cutting his ties to the alternative Sky channel. "We are proceeding down a certain path which we are quite confident will deliver a good outcome," said Driver.
ALT TV founder Thane Kirby - who moved the channel from a weak free-to-air Auckland frequency on to the Sky digital platform - insisted the channel was sound and there were no financial issues relating to the owners' exit.
Kirby said he has bought back into the dance music radio station George FM where he will be programme director.
ALT TV's move to Sky was always an ambitious proposal.
As a tiny free-to-air channel broadcasting from Auckland's K Road on a weak UHF signal, it had access to a tiny audience.
Moving on to the Sky digital platform meant it was available in nearly 50 per cent of New Zealand homes, establishing a potential audience for advertisers.
But it had to pay Sky for the privilege and that added a big overhead to the channel while ad revenue was getting tighter.
One media insider suggested that ALT TV's fortunes may have been hurt by C4 - the youth-oriented channel owned by MediaWorks that drew some of the same viewers.
HUSTLE FOR RUSSELL
Chalk and cheese commentators Bill Ralston and Russell Brown seem to have a real antipathy.
In his Herald on Sunday column last week Ralston railed against the "It's Not Okay" ad campaign in which "a collection of earnest men smugly entreat other men to not give their partners and kids the bash". In his Public Address blog Brown - who is one of the great and good on the It's Not Okay campaign - said Ralston has frequently seemed to have more words to write in columns every week than he has ideas to write about. "But I'm not sure if he's written anything as poor and tendentious as his column in last weekend's Herald on Sunday." Ill feeling goes back before the election when a tired-sounding Ralston got carried away in a tirade against Brown and the ethics of bloggers on his RadioLive afternoon show.
Maybe they should get Bill on to Brown's Media 7 Media show for some fireworks - though I hear Ralston, a former head of TVNZ news and current affairs, is among people that TVNZ has banned from the show.
IT'S NOT OKAY
I'm with Ralston on those social engineering ads. I know the messages are valid - but the Nanny State connections are so pervasive: Driving Is In His Blood, The Grim Reaper intersections, the slob who throws his kid around the room, the female at after-work drinks being sexually accosted.
We are warned not to fry up after a night on the booze. All failings that are not a problem for the vast majority of viewers and could be mentioned once in a while.
But viewers are whacked with them every night. Ad campaigns keep a lot of advertising people in jobs and bolster television revenue. But sometimes they make free-to-air TV impossible to watch.
TANGIBLE GROWTH
The print and online production company that merged with Allan Dick's Straight Eight Publications says New Zealand has too many magazines.
But Tangible Media chief executive David Atkins says he has no plans to drop any of the new titles. With the production company already running Top Gear magazine - through its magazine arm Tangible Media - Image Centre has become a biggish independent and prominent in the motoring niche.
The production company - which ran Real Groove, New Zealand Rugby World and New Zealand Fishing World made news at the end of last year when it merged with Jones Publishing and picked up rights to Top Gear and other titles such as Dish.
Image Centre - a printer and website operator - is in production for Jones and Straight Eight and Atkins confirmed that debt affected how the merger had been structured. He said the merging of the production and publishing roles ensured efficiencies. Michael Carney of media analyst The Media Counsel agreed that the idea of a production and publishing arms getting together could make sense.
He said that motoring magazines - which have grown over the past few years - had the potential to continue to grow in the tough commercial environment.
VERDON EXITS EARLY
The general manager of APN News and Media operation Northern Publishing - Tony Verdon - has retired and the advertising manager Anita King-Lassauw has moved to be account manager for its real estate business.
APN issued a memo this week to its Whangarei-based operation saying that Verdon - who has a long association with the newspaper business going back to the days of Wilson and Horton - will be retiring from March 31.
A former editor of the Northern Advocate, Verdon took over the general manager's role in 2005.
SKY PASSES TV ONE
Free to air channels embarking on 2009 campaigns for the television war with Sky TV passed a symbolic milestone in the AGB Neilsen survey of television watching trends last year. People are watching more pay channels on Sky.
In the AGB Neilsen results for the first time across the entire day more people watched pay television channels than watched the perennial market leader TV One. In prime time Sky was beaten by TV One and TV2 but was third equal with TV3.
(The Sky results - by the way - do not include people watching free channels through Sky). Results should be treated cautiously as symbolic - they compare one channel against more than 50 on Sky.
But they do reflect the growing penetration of Sky with its increasingly diverse line-up of channels. They illustrate the difficulty for free-to-air platform Freeview - convincing people to buy their decoders.
The 10-year figures on audience share released by AGB Neilsen - from 1998 to 2008 - show that TV One's audience share went from 38.6 per cent to 27.2 per cent and Sky pay channels nearly trebled from 9.3 per cent 27.7 per cent, passing TV One for the first time.
During the same period TV3 went from 20 per cent to 17 per cent in the 10-year period. The good news for the combined free to air sector - TV One, TV2, TV3, C4, Prime, and other small channels is that most of the time people spend watching TV is on free-to-air channels: 82.3 per cent compared with 17.6 per cent.
Free-to-air channels scored even better in prime time from 6pm to 10.30pm when they drag in the vast bulk of TV advertising revenue: 87.2 per cent share compared to 12.2 per cent for Sky.
Sky chief executive John Fellet said Sky channels did not carry advertising or earn their own ad revenue and advertising only made up 5 per cent of Sky Network's revenue, 10 per cent if you count its free to air channel Prime.
