The Country Channel

John Drinnan says in the Herald that:

An out-of-pocket founder of Country Channel says anybody who invests in the current media market needs “big balls”.

Presumably the farmer-cum-TV producer Andy Tyler means big balls of baling twine, or confidence. Haystacks of money would be useful. Tyler says he is out of pocket more than $1 million and trying to recover money owed by Country Channel Ltd, the company that ran the premium tier channel on the Sky platform. [. . .]

Tyler said it had been been difficult to build subscribers from scratch after the launch in October 2008 with Country Channel struggling in a tough market. 

Drinnan sagely concludes:

These are tough times in the media business.

Yes they are, but times are always tough in the media business. It probably makes it even tougher when your target market, i.e. everyone in farming, spends all day working outside and all night inside watching TV One, like everyone else. And they don’t all have Sky.

It must make it even tougher when your interviewers, on the all-too-few segments of local content, are comically clueless about the industry.