Living Index
Auckland is now the 5th best places in the world to live. The annual Mercer's Worldwide Quality of Livinng Survey just got published and I am surprised to see Auckland, so high up on the list. It definitely has a good quality of living but still standing in the top 5 seems a bit strange. I thought Sydney would be in a better position but nope...If you want to read more about the whole survey thing - here is the website. And yeah petrol has hit a new high of NZ$ 1.62 per litre - that is a lot - I can still remember paying NZ$ 0.85 per litre 2 years back - things are only gonna get worse.
I have finalized the main lead -'Roger', for 'Nowhere to Love' and I am really excited. Who is it? Well you will just have to wait for the update on the website - which should be sometime soon. So that's another step in the right direction and now have to start casting other leads around him. And yeah do check some of the photos from the second location reccee HERE.
The other surprising thing is the hush hush affair of redundancy at Prime TV, after it was bought out by Sky TV. On one hand Sky seems to giving signals that the local content on Prime would increase and their commitment on that is firm - which naturally means that there should be more jobs arising but instead atleast 40 people have been made redundant at Prime TV. It doesn't make sense at all - almost seems like an eye wash towards more profitability.
Eyes are tired while my brain is going thousand miles an hour - i will let them decide what I should do.
Bye for now,
Amit
The other surprising thing is the hush hush affair of redundancy at Prime TV, after it was bought out by Sky TV. On one hand Sky seems to giving signals that the local content on Prime would increase and their commitment on that is firm - which naturally means that there should be more jobs arising but instead atleast 40 people have been made redundant at Prime TV. It doesn't make sense at all - almost seems like an eye wash towards more profitability.
Eyes are tired while my brain is going thousand miles an hour - i will let them decide what I should do.
Bye for now,
Amit
Labels: New Zealand, Nowhere to Love
posted by Amit @ 5:44 PM
5 Comments:
I know I'm a bit late on this, but I want to get my 2 cents in.
I think the reason why there has not been more noise made about redundancies at Prime is because it's pretty much expected when a larger successful company buys a small company which has never turned a profit. Yes, turning a buck is part of the reason - that's crucial to business. But there will always be some duplication of roles when a company is bought out - why employ two people to perform one job?
Assuming that Sky/Prime comes through on it's talk of increased local content, that won't stave off redundancies. Some people who have lost their jobs will likely be administrative people who don't have anything to do with content production. In fact, depending on the nature of the content, some work may be farmed out to production houses, which will be good for the industry itself.
I don't mean to trivialise the loss of jobs - nobody enjoys the process, but it's just what happens when these sorts of acquisitions take place.
I'm sure Sky wouldn't have bought a failing tv channel just to run it into the ground and lose a stack of cash. They have hired a former TVNZ programmer, which to me seems like a committment to making it a channel worth tuning into. Sure, buying Prime also conveniently satifisies Sky's obligations regarding free-to-air delayed coverage of sport (handy, given TV3 was being difficult) but ultimately they could've simply decrypted one of their own UHF frequencies if they'd had to.
Look at it this way - loss of jobs sucks, but if Sky didn't buy Prime, who would? The channel would've gone out of business without the backing of Channel Nine Australia and even more people would find themselves jobless.
read again: i said about 40 techos lost jobs - that is a BAD thing...What sucks about the whole thing has been that it has been kept really quite in the media, that my friend is a VERY BAD thing - irrespective of whether firing 40 people is beneficial for the industry or not.
Your viewpoint is much appreciated but hopefully there is more discussion about this thing instead of keeping this a really quite affair.
I've just read it again and it says nothing about techos :)
That does suck for the 40 people out of a job but we need to put it in perspective. It's like I said - if Sky didn't buy Prime, everybody there would've been out of a job. Prime has lost $76m since it's creation in 1998. Nine wanted to get rid of it. CanWest was never going to be in a position to buy it. TVNZ wouldn't have bought it unless they wanted only the frequency (TVNZ has done that before. Remember Max, anyone?) which would still result in job losses for everyone. Sky's backing of Prime means that it can (hopefully) be a true competitor to TVNZ/CanWest, which is good for the industry as a whole. There's really no way you can takeover a company and not have redundancies as a result of job duplication. That's a harsh reality.
However, the good news for tape monkeys is that Sky is going to go completely non-linear in the near future and will hire people to transer the large tape archive to hard drive. Then everyone will have to learn to be non-linear monkeys I suppose... but, that is the way of the future.
oops..sorry if I forgot to mention the 40 techos in the first write :D i stand corrected.
tape monkeys will become computer apes then...
Cool, I wanna be a computer ape :D
Post a Comment
<< Home