KEY POINTS:
Television New Zealand is facing a battle for its relevance as a sports broadcaster as it competes for television rights to the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India.
TVNZ bosses were disappointed this week when they missed out on the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and the 2012 summer games in London.
They insist their attention now is the Beijing Olympics next year, which they will be showing. But TVNZ desperately needs to hold on to the Commonwealth competition.
The bidding process for Delhi is expected to start early next year with chequebooks waving from TVNZ and Sky Television. TV3 might also bid.
This week the International Olympics Committee awarded Sky and its free-to-air network Prime the rights to the Olympics in Vancouver and London.
The bidding is understood to have been a test of who had the biggest wallets, with cash-rich pay TV operator Sky covering the games on Prime, Sky pay channels, mobile phones and its website.
Once upon a time TVNZ was the only real bidder for the Olympics rights because the IOC would never hand them over to a pay TV outfit such as Sky. Now with Prime, Sky has the upper hand.
NZRFU moves to Ogilvy
The New Zealand Rugby Union announced yesterday it has dropped Saatchi & Saatchi and appointed Ogilvy as its exclusive advertising agency. It chose Ogilvy after a four-way pitch for the account.
NZRU commercial manager Fraser Holland said the move would help invigorate interest in rugby while growing revenues.
Ogilvy boss Greg Partington said Ogilvy looked closely at the business model of the NFL for its strategic direction, but also cited Ogilvy Action, its Asia Pacific sports promotion arm, as a source of insight in this specialised space.
Harman on high
Brent Harman remains one of the biggest mover and shakers on the New Zealand media scene. This column reported this year that the former TVNZ and Prime Australia chief executive had been appointed to the board of directors for MediaWorks, the company that runs TV3, C4 and half New Zealand's radio stations, and is controlled by Australian private equity company Ironbridge Capital. It seems Harman has been appointed chairman.
Separately Harman remains a director of Prime in Australia, which runs regional television stations and has secured a 76 per cent stake in Australian entertainment company The Becker Group.
With Prime supremo Paul Ramsay, Harman is on the board of Becker Group, whose interests include cinemas such as the Bridgeway in Auckland's Northcote, and OnSite Broadcasting.
Good year for Fred Hollows
Chief executive Brent Impey is the main man at MediaWorks and that presumably is reflected in the allocation of shares to management when Ironbridge took over the company this year. Although the names of individual allocations are not spelled out, the share parcels differ and one of the parcels - by far the biggest and believed to be for Impey - is for 850,000 shares.
Based on Ironbridge's purchase price when privatising the company of $2.68 a share, that would amount to about $2.4 million.
That is on top of the $3 million or so he would have picked up when CanWest sold out to Ironbridge. Impey guards his privacy, but he has made an impact with his generosity.
At a meeting of the Fred Hollows Fellowship - a charity backed by media bosses - he noted that he had had a good year and donated a substantial sum, believed to be $50,000, to the charity.
Battle nearly won
The argument over whether Sky should have to pay for rebroadcast rights for free-to-air channels on its platform is on hold. That gives TVNZ and TV3 the chance to turn around a handful of National Party MPs whose support for Sky threatens to cost free-to-air channels and the New Zealand production industry millions of dollars. The change, which ensures that pay TV companies like IPTV can take the rights for free, is being considered under Section 88 of the Copyright Act.
The most passionate advocate for Sky's position is National MP Gerry Brownlee, but it appears there is now little support in the National caucus. The Maori Party is pro-Sky, but New Zealand First, the Greens and United Future are behind the free-to-air channels. Sky may have lost this battle.
Read my shorts
* It is understood TVNZ is considering yet another revamp of the set for its news - seemingly a bi-annual event. It is budgeted to cost around $700,000 but nobody will be surprised if that blows out to $1 million.
* Qantas, sponsors of the Qantas Television Awards, apparently declined permission for TVNZ to use its name in a post-awards advertisement that pointed out TVNZ total ratings were typically higher than TV3.
* The NBR media commentator and RadioLive parliamentary analyst Tom Frewen has been moved to note that a fill-in writer for this column - public relations consultant and man-about-Wellington Richard Griffin - was spotted lunching with MediaWorks boss Brent Impey, raising the issue of potential conflict of interest.
Griffin says the commercial meeting with Impey was arranged several weeks after the publication of a Herald media article mentioning MediaWorks' commercial performance.
* Pacific Blue's sponsorship deal with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra goes further than domestic travel, the orchestra said yesterday. In the deal, the newest competitor in the domestic air travel market agrees to assist with domestic travel and support the orchestra when it tours overseas.
