History
The channel began life as the FX in 1995 and became available on Austar in April 1999. It was relaunched as W. in 2003, shortly before digital broadcasting began. W screened original Australian programming such as Beauty and the Beast, Love My Way, From Here to Maternity and Studio A with Simon Burke. It also had Pay-TV rights to many popular U.S. primetime drama series such as Pushing Dasies and The Wire and repeats of many other series.
Antonia Kidman, sister of actress Nicole Kidman was the face of the W channel, for quite some time and has presented a few parenting and entertainment programs for this and other channels. W2, the timeshift channel broadcasting programs two hours later, was launched in September 2006. A website for the channel was also launched in September 2006.
W. underwent a transformation in April 2009, which included an updated logo (now simply W) and several new additions to the primetime line-up. W HD was launched on 15 November 2009, on both Austar and Foxtel.
In 2012, it was announced that SoHo will broadcast the new Australian drama Wentworth, a re-imaging of the classic television show Prisoner. It will air in 2013.
Read more about this topic: W Channel (Australia)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)