While the production of television and who wins the ratings (and therefore the right to charge the most for the advertising dollar) is a very serious business, it’s also about ego and a bit of fun. It’s even better when that ego and fun cross over into a nice, sharp dig at the competition. Playful? Sure. Sincere? You bet. Self promoting? With two sugars, thanks.

The news game is cut-throat – the first out with the pictures wins. We saw that during Tropical Cyclone Yasi when Sunrise’s Grant Denyer was reporting via Skype from an iPhone the morning after the event had passed and there was no power other than in mobile phone towers. So, understandably, the networks like to guard their exclusive footage very closely. All of them are guilty of some form of trickery – be it upsizing the image/zooming into so the network watermark is cut off, or running a watermark band through the centre of the footage to attempt to stop the network id being lost (as we saw in this clip). That Ch7 chose to blur it and brand it as their exclusive… well, that takes king-size cajones.

This will not be the last we hear of this. Oh no. The battle is only heating up in 2011.