Once the market had punished Nine for its poor performance and its attempt at deception, attention turned to what the earnings drop meant.
Was it the result of cyclical factors, such as weak consumer spending and confidence dragging advertising spend lower?
Or was it a sign that the increasingly fragmented audience for media is really starting to bite into the advertising revenue of traditional broadcasters?
Unsurprisingly, Nine chief executive David Gyngell said the profit downturn was a cyclical issue, describing the profit downgrade as a "bump, not a hill". His confidence is not widely shared.
Goldman Sachs media analyst Christian Guerra said the downgrade was a result of "wider issues" in the TV advertising market. "In our view the structural headwinds we see ahead for television may have arrived sooner than we expected," he wrote in a research note to investors.
It's hard to disagree with Guerra. Gone are the days when workplaces and schools would buzz with conversation about what we watched on TV last night. Advertisers used to pay a lot of money for all those eyeballs.
Household internet speeds are now fast enough to threaten not just print but also TV. On any night these days we're as likely to be streaming (or pirating) something, catching a show on cable or playing a video game as watching free-to-air TV.
As viewers have abandoned free to air networks, so have advertisers. The days when TV networks ruled the airwaves and could command a premium for doing so are gone.
Share sales
James Packer saw the writing on the wall. He inherited the Nine Network from his father Kerry and sold most of it for A$4.6 billion in 2006 to a private equity consortium which lost most of its money.
Most Australians will remember the front-page punch-up between Packer and Nine's Gyngell on a Bondi footpath last year. Gyngell looks like he's set for another dust-up, but this time with the corporate regulator.
Not only did Nine Entertainment try to sneak its bad news out on a Friday afternoon, it has also emerged that Gyngell sold $1.5 million of his own shares in the company just two weeks before the "surprise" earnings downgrade. Market observers are asking how Gyngell couldn't have known sales figures were below budget, although Nine insists it made the earnings downgrade public as soon as it became aware of it.
Maybe. But one thing is clear: selling a large personal stake in the company just before a downgrade makes his claim Nine has hit a "bump, not a hill" disingenuous at best.
The heir to Murdoch
Much like sinologists monitor the decrees of the National People's Congress to work out what's going on in China, Murdoch watchers scrutinise the shuffling of executives around Rupert Murdoch's media empire to divine which of his children will succeed him.
And why not? There's a lot at stake. Which other family will anoint a son to become one of the world's most powerful men, aside perhaps from the Bush family in the US?
News on Friday that Rupert Murdoch is planning to hand the job of chief executive of 21st Century Fox to his younger son James gives the soothsayers a lot to think about. At the same time as James, 42, takes over as chief executive, his brother Lachlan, 43, will become executive co-chairman of the company alongside his 84-year old father.
In doing so, Murdoch is treating his publicly listed US$68 billion media empire like a family-owned fish and chip shop that he can pass on to his children.
The moves answer one question: we now know one of the boys will take over and not their more commercially successful sister Elisabeth .
But Murdoch has left open the more tantalising question of which of his sons will ultimately succeed him. This is a battle yet to be played out.
