TVT (TV station)

TVT is the first provincial television station in Australia and Hobart's, and Tasmania's, first television station, delivering its first official broadcast on 23 May 1960. The callsign stood for "TeleVision Tasmania".

Initially it broadcast from the Mount Wellington transmitter on VHF channel 6, to all of Hobart. Its broadcast licence area covered all of southern Tasmania, these areas being reached by various repeaters and retransmitters.

It continued to broadcast as TVT-6 until 1982, where it was bought by ENT, owner of Launceston station TNT-9. Both stations began broadcasting under the unified on-air identity of TasTV by 1985, thus becoming for the first time a statewide network. ENT also owned Vic TV in regional Victoria.

In 1988, TNT-9 was sold to Tricom Corporation (later Southern Cross Broadcasting), leaving TVT-6 continuing to service the south as TasTV. And with the dawn of statewwide aggregration rising in the early 1990s, TasTV began its preparation, this time as the Nine Network broadcaster for the state on the very moment it would restart broadcasts to Northern Tasmania thanks to aggregration. It adopted Nine's idents and campaigns and a new slogan, First in Tasmania, in 1993, and the news service was reconfigured to that of Nine's.

And indeed, it came: the biggest change to Tasmanian television came in 1994 when aggregation occurred. This allowed both TasTV (TVT-6) and Southern Cross (TNT-9) to broadcast across the entire state and for the first time, give Tasmanians a choice of commercial stations. TasTV, now once again broadcasting all over the state, officially confirmed itself as the Nine Network affiliate and Southern Cross held dual Seven and Ten affiliations.

In October 1994, WIN Corporation bought ENT in a forced takeover and thus TasTV became WIN Tasmania, the state division of the growing regional network. It still uses the callsign TVT-6 for its Hobart and southern Tasmania licence.

In 2002 WIN Corporation and Southern Cross Broadcasting formed a joint venture company to broadcast a third commercial station, Tasmanian Digital Television, in a digital-only format.

On 1 July 2016, as part of a wide national re-alignment of regional television, TVT swapped affiliations with TDT switching from Nine Network to Network Ten, but TVT rebroadcasts a feed of ATV-10 from Melbourne with local ads.

Programming

WIN Television broadcasts its programming from Network Ten, including their regional signals of TEN, ONE and ELEVEN. WIN also broadcasts news, current affairs and sport programs such as Studio 10, Ten Eyewitness News First at Five, The Project and Ten Sport.

WIN News Tasmania

WIN News produces an hour long bulletin incorporating national, international and regional news seven days a week.

WIN News Tasmania is presented by Georgia Love on weeknights and Stephanie Anderson at weekends. Sports news is presented on weeknights by Brent Costelloe and at weekends by Virginia Lette. The bulletin is broadcast from the ABC studios in Hobart with district newsrooms based in Launceston and Devonport.

Weekend bulletins were previously discontinued on Sunday 26 June 2011 - they were replaced by simulcasts of the Melbourne edition of Nine News^[1] until they were reintroduced on Saturday 14 July 2012.^[2]

As part of the Ten affiliation swap deal, WIN News Tasmania moved to 5.30pm-6.30pm weeknights & 5.30pm-6.00pm weekends, launching a new look based on Ten Eyewitness News.

In September 2016, WIN News Tasmania moved to an half hour bulletin incorporating regional news from 6.00pm-6.30pm weeknights, launching a new look based on Ten Eyewitness News.

Reporters

Main Transmitters

Notes:

• 1. HAAT estimated from http://www.itu.int/SRTM3/ using EHAAT.
• 2. Analogue transmission ceased as of 9 April 2013 as part of the national conversion to digital-only television

References

External links

• Australian Television Archive page on TVT6