No Rock And Roll Fun

ROCK'S OFF... FOR HOW LONG?: Where's it gone? The spirit of '76, we mean? Well, P-Rock TV has disappeared from the Sky Digital package and online is promising this is just a temporary blip while it sorts out re-financing.
The "bye... for now" message on the p-rock website is curious - the team who brought the channel on air claim they were three snarling upstarts who knew nothing about TV who wound up getting higher figures (they claim "600,000 viewers" a week) than channels with larger launch budgets. There's a bit of moaning at the lack of support from advertising agencies, although if they really were expecting Mazda to be placing 'zoom zoom' ads in the middle of lo-budget punk vids they didn't only know nothing about TV, they must have known nothing about anything. Their own figures say they had one of the highest ratings for ten to twenty-four year olds watching Sky, but that's such a broad audience group as to be almost useless - very few products sell well to kids moving to high school and first time home buyers.
If the team do come back - and we kind of hope they do, it would be nice to think you can launch a music channel with almost no cash behind them - they might want to think about not merely overthrowing the traditional channel launch model, but also coming up with a different way to fund the station through advertising. MTV2, when it first introduced advertising, attempted to create a new model by offering bands the chance to plug their gigs on the channel, but it never seemed like this idea was given the support it would have needed. Maybe this is something P-Rock could look at resurrecting?
[Big thanks to Simon Tyers for bringing this all to our attention]