Sky's sporting chance

Sky are mixing it with the big guns, parking their new sports news programme Sport 365 (Sky Sport 1, 7pm) in a primetime slot.

It was pointless going head to head with the "real" news between 6 and 7 on TV One and TV3.

And a surefire way to murder a new programme is to stick it up against all the murders on Coronation St, which turns up at 7.30pm two nights a week.

So Sport 365 has been wedged between, a nice sporting interlude if you can wheel granny away from watching Holmes and/or wrestle the TV control off Shortland St fans.

While Holmes might not rate quite like Coro St, those programmes still have a very healthy following.

And given that sports watchers often engage in some bargaining to secure the all-important weekend sports rights, Sport 365 might lose out as an easy chip to play.

Still, if you've got multi-TV options or are a master of household politics, Sport 365 is a reasonable watch.

It opened with a customary first-night glitch on Monday - a picture of Toutai Kefu accompanying a story about Stacey Jones.

Such hiccups seem par for the course with new media ventures.

A classic, well over a decade ago, was committed by the Auckland Star newspaper, which celebrated the introduction of colour photographs with a large shot of Sir Richard Hadlee in action - bowling left-handed.

By comparison, the Kefu-Jones mix-up was ho-hum.

There's a certain wackiness to the order and presentation of Sport 365's items.

They might start with a magazine-style twist on a news story, such as the Tall Blacks' game against Australia, then follow it with a short - we're talking one sentence here - story which sounds as though it has been nicked out of a newspaper.

But it sweeps up all the news and visuals of the past 24 hours, which means while you'll hear some things you already know you'll also pick up others you've missed.

And there are magazine-type stories, including one on Tuesday about middle- distance runner Nick Willis, that round the programme out.

Sport 365 is hardly deep and meaningful, but it scratches the surface more than the network news sports slots which are dominated by soundbites.

Minority sports, which in a few weeks time will mean anything outside of rugby, also seem to get more space than in the mainstream media.

And the presenters, including the bubbly Sky veteran Stephen McIvor, don't indulge in that annoying network news chit-chat.

Sport 365 does highlight one of my bugbears about Sky - the lack of really good in-depth features.

The subscription channel is (in our two-income, no-kids household at least) pretty good value, even if the TV set gets far more downtime than it used to.

But the avalanche of live sport is not backed up on the feature front.

Sports 365 doesn't fill that gap, and it's not compulsory or compulsive viewing in its present state.

It won't drag in stacks of subscriptions, or have existing subscribers whooping with delight - that's mainly the job of live sport broadcasts.

But if you can cope with the three-and-a-half minutes of advertising and sneaky Sky promos in the middle of the 25-minute show - and granny is agreeable - it's definitely worth a watch.