Does Home & Away need a new UK broadcaster?

[James Martin]

It's obvious that the show is a millstone around the neck of Viacom's Channel 5.

In a week,  the evening showing will be only available in sub-SD quality on a little-watched spinoff channel.  We all know people don't make the effort to seek things out if a show moves channel - look at how many stopped watching when the show moved from ITV and that was just two places down.  Now it's 30-odd.

It's obvious as far as Viacom are concerned, it's all about Neighbours now and Home & Away is but an inconvenience, receiving little promo or marketing, especially so since RTL sold the channel in the late 2000s.

Whilst C5 supposedly have a "lifetime" deal, they must be able to get out of it if they don't really want the show and another UK broadcaster does?  ITV is now live lifestyle shows and quizzes in daytime, it wouldn't fit anymore.  C4 wouldn't want it either.  But I reckon it could fit into the BBC's schedules and maybe even reclaim its spot as top dog over Neighbours.  It can't be costing Viacom that much at the moment if they can afford to hide it away on 5 Star.

[Red Ranger 1]

I think the very fact that Neighbours is apparently flourishing on Channel 5 shows that moving channels isn't necessarily death. It wasn't having to push a different button on the remote that lost Home and Away most of its UK audience, it was the fact that the show wasn't on anywhere in the UK for over a year, with many people assuming it had finished completely.

It's not even as though Home and Away isn't being shown on Channel 5 at all (it still gets one daily showing) and I believe it isn't even shown in HD on Position 5 (you have to search further down the EPG for Channel 5 HD). So I don't see any need to hope the BBC want a replacement for Pointless just yet.

[James Martin]

I understand on Freeview, the HD versions of the legacy "main five" are on 101-105, with the SD flavours of 1-5.

With Sky and Virgin, 101-105 are used with the HD versions as default except for BBC One.

Of course, it's not that 5* is only in SD but it's how badly encoded it is.  Same with ITV3 - I followed Classic Emmerdale with the reruns of the episodes from the 90s, and the picture quality on SD was awful - far muddier and artefact-laden than when I remember those episodes originally going out.