The new millennium began with much fanfare for Seven, with the unveiling of its brand new logo, the broadcast of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games and a rollout of successful new shows. However, a downhill slide in ratings over the following few years saw Seven drop significant ratings points and left the network “Desperate” for a solution by 2005.
A new era for Seven was hailed in on New Years Day, as Seven relaunched its network with a completely new look and logo. Everything was changed, from the news to Home and Away. New shows like Popstars and The Mole were a success, and Seven had perhaps the biggest ratings hit in the history of television, the Sydney Olympic Games.
The i7 Internet Portal was launched in 2000 as Seven’s answer to Nine’s successful nineMSN, and was extensively cross promoted on Channel Seven. The seven.com.au site, which had been used as Seven's website for a number of years before, was now redirected to i7.com.au.
In the first half of 2000 (before the Olympics) Seven used two sets of idents alongside the generic one at the top of this page, each with five different versions for the five colours in Seven's colour bar. The line of idents above were used from New Years Day, with the set to the left being used from about March. As Seven introduced and deleted shows from their schedule the idents to the left were charged to incorporate them.
Seven introduced the "blokes in tights" series of idents during the Olympics in September, a concept taken from NBC America. The idents also started the trend of having actual network personalities doing some green-screen performing in an identification. Until now most were either completely computer generated sequences or relied on actors to perform any live-action scenes, however Seven reversed the trend with Nine and Ten soon following.
After the Olympics people right around Australia were "activating dots" by sticking little pieces of cardboard to the bottom right of their TV screens, thanks to Seven's Adopt-a-Dot campaign. It was undertaken to keep ratings up after the Olympics, however many became skeptical that sticking a piece of cardboard to your TV actually did anything to "activate" it!
Digital television made its arrival in 2001, and Seven updated its idents into widescreen, with new scenes and graphics. These ids were the first to be shown in 14:9 ratio on analogue TVs (ie with black bars up the top and bottom).
The success of 2000 could not be maintained into the next few years, with a long line of expensive home-grown flops like Temptation Island, Marshall Law and Greeks on the Roof. New shows like Popstars, Always Greener and The Weakest Link, which started out strongly, quickly lost their steam and were given the axe. Overseas imports were nothing spectacular either, with Nine and Ten grabbing the blockbusters like CSI, Survivor and Big Brother.
The "blokes in tights" were featured in their very own ident from October 2001, seen to the left. Spot the continuity error in the ident - in the long shot of the 5 men standing on the 7, the red man is on the left side of the 7 and the blue man is on the right. However, when the camera is behind them as they are jumping off their order is switched. So all the time the colours on screen are in order; Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue.
It didn’t help Seven by loosing the AFL rights to Nine, Ten and Foxtel in 2001. Seven had last bidding power, but choose to pull out at a staggering $500 million (Seven had paid just $20 million two years earlier). The loss of the broadcast rights forced the closure of Seven’s pay-TV sports channel C7, and also sparked legal action from Seven over it’s belief the rest of the pay-TV market had conspired against it to force C7 off the air.
50% of Pacific Publications, publishers of magazines such as New Idea, TV Week and That’s Life, was sold to Seven from PMP Ltd in 2001. Seven already had a 13.9% stake in PMP, so after buying the other 50% of Pacific Publications in 2003 it sold it’s PMP shares for $30 million. In mid-2002 TV Week was sold to Kerry Packer’s PBL for $60 million, however Pacific Publications still claimed to own the Logie Awards. Pacific launched the failed What’s On Weekly magazine to associate the Logies Awards with, however a court ruling found in favour of PBL that the Logies were part of the TV Week trademark.
Seven joined up with AOL America and Telecom New Zealand (AAPT) in late 2001 to launch the new, expanded internet service provider AOL|7. The deal merged i7 with the AOL site, and saw more cross promotion between the TV station, Pacific Publications and the website. The ISP was not overly successful, and it was not long before Seven sold its stake to Primus Telecom in 2004 for $23 million. This saw the end of both AOL|7 and i7, reverting the station’s website back to seven.com.au.
Seven relaunched just before the opening ceremony of the Manchester Commonwealth Games (July 26) with this new parallelogram theme. All design aspects of the station were changed, with the 7 logo now appearing to be made out of 5 coloured paralellograms. Later in the year the behind-the-scenes IDs from June were brought back, put to the music of the program ID from February, and finished off with the new 7 animation from July.
Another total revamp for Seven came on 9 February 2003, just 6 months after the last. The revamp saw the introduction of new classier ids, set to the song "Point Of View" by DB Boulevard.
In July the final scene was changed to a white background instead of black, and 'the one to watch' was removed from the idents. Seven had been using the slogan for almost 5 years, putting it under all 7 logos in print and on-screen since the 2000 revamp. The end of an era? Well, only 3 months earlier Seven had appointed former 9 executive David Leckie as head of TV operations, whose job it was to bring the ailing network back to life. And the slogan axing was only the first thing on his agenda...
More change for Seven under Leckie control came in September, this time with a new version of the 7 logo - a basic red with no shadows - and no sign of Seven's five colours. An old design aspect has been reintroduced however; the 5 and 2 finger hand signals used by Seven during the mid 90s. The ids feature new very classy scenes of Seven personalities, which were filmed in Sydney during late July.
These IDs were used during the summer of 03/04, with Seven using the 'brand spankin new' theme as an excuse to show a heap of new B-grade US television programmes during prime-time. The IDs feature some of Seven's 'hottest' young stars fooling around at the beach and doing other summery activities.
After a series of disastrous years for Seven ratings-wise, 2005 saw the network pick up two new monster hits from the US and continue on with the huge success of ‘Dancing with the Stars’. Seven led the ratings battle during the 04/05 summer with coverage of the Australian Open. In what must have been Seven’s dream come true, Aussie tennis player Lleyton Hewitt made it through to the men’s final, and afterwards proposed to Home and Away star girlfriend Bec Cartwright. Seven then had exclusive interviews with the pair on Today Tonight, and had used the Australian Open to heavily promote the new US shows ‘Lost’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’. They debuted in the top 2 ratings spots that week, pulling over two million viewers each, and continued successfully.
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