Content Survey Live: Yesterday's Hero: Round 1: Night 2: This Is It… Night Two That Is

 Hey look us over, now we are here: second night of Content Survey Live in 2025, with no commercials here…

This, is it: Night 2 of Content Survey Live for 2025… the first ever weekend publication of a CSL survey, and tonight it’s Melbourne’s turn to turn up the fight.

Sydney last night in the first survey of the 2025 season, showed some magic, (bar a bad call concerning sport) and came home with a 4.5/10.

And now, the ground rules for the 2025 season.

Our focus, in Content Survey Live will be monitoring Ten’s five capital city news services (a benefit of technological change, now allowing us to watch interstate bulletins on delay), using the same criteria we used in the “Great Local News Study” from Kuttsy's Pitch XI in August, 2019.

-Locally sourced stories: that is stories reported by local journos. Really big local market stories with national impacts, also fit here. Voiced over local stories are counted separately.

-Live crosses: stuff that is used to embellish a story.

-(NEW in 2025) Local overnight news: Handled via a system we call collectively, the “Ray Robinson Number”: 1pt for V/O’d overnight news, 2pts for a full story, the total is reported at each survey’s end. A special prize will be given for the regular season’s Ray Robinson Number leader. 

-Weather is not counted.

-Sport is not counted if it’s done by obviously freelance journos, or voiced over pieces: you gotta have dedicated reporters there, with their mug on air reporting a sports story for it to count

-(NEW in 2025) The “Hometown Rule” now applies to both Monday and Thursday night in the regular season as well as in the three Four Quarter Blitz finals (where the highest ranked participant goes first) outside of the Grand Final.

- (NEW in 2025) No 2nd survey (i.e. Tuesday/Friday) can be posted until 12hrs have elapsed after the live survey (Monday/Thursday) in the main season and the three Four Quarter Blitz finals outside the Grand Final. It can be worked on however, and scheduled.

-(NEW in 2025) Ties on the table, at the end of the season, have their seeding for finals decided by countback of fixture scores excluding byes (out of 40)

 

Will tonight be “it” for Melbourne against the old foe…

TALE OF THE TAPE: MELBOURNE.

10 Melbourne’s sixtieth may have been in August last year, but the 2023 champion, and close runner-up in 2024 has a lot more to prove this year on a even playing field. Melbourne has shown that it has had the chops to push ahead in the past, but will it bring home the bacon in 2025?

So, it’s live (albeit with Friday’s news) on Saturday… for Melbourne’s first survey of 2025. And a reminder for Sean Connery if it comes up on Celebrity Jeopardy: this is a content survey: not a content scurvy.

We open tonight's Melbourne bulletin with two stories which were buried after "Future Western Sydney" coverage in Sydney tonight: the release of Tony Mokbel on bail (and a live cross explaining the conditions)

Which somehow got a blank graphic whilst in front of his garage...

And the MCG gun scare, where the AI-powered metal detectors failed to to pick up a gun snuck in (two points for the Ray Robinson Number), A shooting in Mulgrave (again two points for the Ray Robinson number), a live cross for a arrest on a 2023 murder, while the Super hack was demoted to the second window.

Right before sport, we get: Must Do Melbourne, for the only time this year on Content Survey Live: due to the move toward a same night strategy (meaning anytime Melbourne doesn't land Monday's news it'll be Thursday's news)

Sport, in the Melbourne fashion is strong: with healthy AFL pieces, and a dedicated wrap to last night's Collingwood/Carlton blockbuster that has made news already for completely different reasons, as well as a cross to Kardinia Park in Geelong.

However, the preview looked as if it had been written by Lorem Ipsum.

Weather presentation, however looked better in the opener, than on set... as has become tradition in Melbourne.

Overall, a performance that has shown the Melbourne standard, with some great decisions made, despite a few graphical hitches.

The Scores:

Four full local stories.

No voiced over content.

Three live crosses.

Two local sports stories.

A Ray Robinson Number of 4 (due to MCG story and Mulgrave shooting).

Last year: Melbourne's highest score was the 7.1/10 it received in the now infamous Survey of Origin fixture, that it lost to Adelaide.

Tonight: Melbourne scored: 6.5/10.

This is a slight downturn from last year, where it never dropped below 7 all season, but it is enough to win the first fixture of the 2025 Content Survey Live season.

Sydney: 4.5/10

Melbourne: 6.5/10

Melbourne gains the first two points for this season, alongside it's rival: Adelaide, who has a bye this week.

Melbourne is on track to also win the first week's Ray Robinson Number contest... but is expecting a significant fight from Brisbane and Perth on Monday to get there.

We also interrupt this scheduled content survey, for a special Week 1 offer concerning Kuttsywood's Couch One on Patreon: Use code "TVSPELLSMAGIC" to get 60% off your first month's subscription to our Veritas on KW: One and KW.360 tiers. Our first ever discount Patreon offer expires on April 15 at midday.

The 6:00 Sunday Night Sound:

Welcome to “The 6:00 Sunday Night Sound” our tribute throughout the regular season, to the milestone that is the fiftieth anniversary of of ABC music institution, Countdown televising it’s first episode in colour, which passed on March 1. Last night, was about the poppy beats of Sherbet. Tonight, we take a stand for Melbourne’s first big mid seventies rock act: Skyhooks.

Skyhooks were literally the antithesis of Sherbet, in every shape and form, with a sprinkle of glam rock in between: whose early sound reflected the reality of life for a young Australian in mid-70’s suburbia, in fact, the first Skyhooks album “Living in The 70’s” ended up with almost three quarters of the album banned from commercial radio airplay due to questionable content: but it’s first real push nationally came from one spark: the ABC’s 2JJ (the station in Sydney that became the spark for ABC’s national youth network Triple J) when it opened with one of the commercial radio banned Skyhooks tracks: “You Just Like Me 'Cos I'm Good In Bed” in January 1975. Even the Skyhooks B-sides became legendary. Case in point…

Saturday Night.

The peak for Skyhooks was between 1975 and 1978: when the biggest part of that success, Shirley Strachan left the band. On Monday night, we look at the first single of a post-Strachan Skyhooks… that was topical, tropical, but ultimately ended up signalling the beginning of the end of the Skyhooks name as a first run act.

Well, that’s it for the first half of Week 1 of Content Survey Live. A reminder that at 2am, tonight: NSW and Victoria return back to AEST until October: meaning that any east coast surveys from here on out will be even tighter productions. Join us, on Monday and Tuesday for Brisbane and Perth’s first surveys of the 2025 season.

A reminder of our socials:
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