No room for Rieu in Foxtel arts channel

WHATEVER happened to Andre Rieu on television? He's the fiddling Dutchman whose international tours are a case of "lock up your grandmothers".

In October 2009 he collected $15.7 million from Australian ticket sales, playing to more than 90,000 fans with his Johann Strauss orchestra.

He was a phenomenon with album sales of about 10 million in Australia. Louise says she doesn't think that even Neil Diamond did that and Hot August Night is still the biggest thing in Louise's life. Her daughter Olivia thinks it's a night to forget.

Each of Rieu's shows cost nearly $6 million to stage and they feature replica castles, horse-drawn carriages and fountains. Neil Diamond pulled mega box office with just a black shirt and a guitar.

Rieu's 2009 DVD, Live in Australia, was the fifth best-selling DVD of the year and seven of his DVDs featured in the top 50.

Few of us had heard of Rieu until two years ago when suddenly Ovation, then the arts channel on Foxtel, started running his programs. Ovation, like Foxtel's 100 or so other channels, didn't have a big audience but it was the right group of people dedicated to the arts.

Charlie, who is one of your legitimate arts people, still haughtily sniffs at all of this, saying that Rieu isn't really the arts. But as we know, marketing these days is not about big numbers, it's about selecting a target market and cutting out the waste. It worked incredibly well for Andre Rieu.

Foxtel is quite cheap entertainment. After all, for roughly $100 a month you can get about 100 channels and tailor the entertainment to your needs. You have to be a bit of a sports nut to get all the value out of Foxtel as the top 30 programs are all sports,although there is something for most interests.

And its influence, as Rieu has proved, is formidable.After all, Olivia says that his 10 million album sales equal $350 million. Incredible.

But now the Ovation channel has been dropped from the main Foxtel package and has been replaced by an arts channel called ''Stvdio'' and, interestingly, it's run by SBS.

Kim Williams, the capable chief executive of Foxtel, has made the move to bounce the Rieu marketing machine - the new channel doesn't seem to want to know about the fiddling Dutchman.

Williams is an outstanding man in the arts and has an amazing record - chairman of the Sydney Opera House, former chairman of Musica Viva, founder of the Film Finance Corporation, the list goes on.

With all that cred, I don't know why Williams didn't get Foxtel to run the arts channel.

The strength of Foxtel is the reason why everyone is waiting for the anti-siphoning announcements about sport. You will remember this is the rule that allows the free-to-air channels to run all the big sports to the exclusion of Foxtel. The AFL grand final, under present arrangements, will never appear on Foxtel, much as it would love it.

The free-to-air channels argue that this would make Foxtel too powerful. Charlie thinks that Rieu would seem to prove it.  If Foxtel had all the big sporting events and control over them, some think that Foxtel could damage the following of a team by dropping coverage.

For instance, if it refused to cover any of the Richmond games, that might be the end of the club. Mind you, if the Tigers don't win a game soon it won't matter.