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Home and Away is an Australian weeknightly half-hour television soap opera produced in Sydney by the Seven Network since January 1988. It is broadcast on the Seven Network and its affiliates in Australia and is exported to many countries, most notably the United Kingdom, where it briefly became the subject of a bidding war between ITV and Five which Five won. The show has more overall viewers in the larger UK market than it has in its home market, but a higher proportion of viewers in Australia, due to Australia's smaller population base, making it the highest rating locally produced drama. Furthermore, many fans believe the shift in the UK from ITV to Five damaged its popularity. Contract obligations sent it off air in the UK for a year and the smaller audience share Five has means the show now rates significantly lower than it did on ITV (though it is Five's second highest rated show) and its ratings are less than half of BBC1's Neighbours. Five funds more than half of the production costs. It has run since January 1988 and is still in production.

Australian Broadcast
Home and Away is broadcast in Australia on weekdays at 7:00 p.m.. The show airs for 46 weeks each year (except for occassions where worldwide events take priority such as tennis and Olympic Games). Each new season begins on the second Monday in January (an exception to this was the 2006 season where it returned on the third Monday), and the season finale airs on the last Friday in November.

During the broadcast there are three ad-breaks and immediately following the broadcast of each episode is a short promotional trailer for the next episode.

Repeat episodes of the series were broadcast between 1999 and 2002, with a one-year break in 2000. The first 623 episodes (except for Episode 469, which was overlooked when Seven were showing the tennis in September 2001) were shown in this run, before it was taken off in May 2002, and so far has never returned.

International Broadcasts
As of 2006, in the UK, the show is broadcast weekdays at 6:00 p.m., (repeated 12.00 p.m. weekdays) on Five. An omnibus edition aired on Saturday mornings when that weeks episodes are all repeated. As of October 2005, there has been no airing of this programme.

In New Zealand, the show is broadcast weekdays at 5:30 p.m., (repeated 10.30 AM on weekdays and an omnibus airs on Sundays at 10:15 AM). 1996 episodes are currently shown on Prime TV at 3:30 p.m. weekdays.

In Ireland the show is broadcast weekdays at 1:25 p.m. on RTÉ One and repeated at 6:30 p.m. on RTÉ Two regulary getting into the top 5 ratings for that week.

Other countries that broadcast Home and Away include: Belgium on Kanaal Twee; Denmark; Estonia; Iceland; Israel; Lithuania; Norway; Poland; South Africa; Sweden; France.

Neighbours is a long-running Australian soap opera, running daily episodes of 22 minutes (excluding commercials). It originally aired on the Seven Network in Australia in 1985; however, they cancelled the series later that year. The series was immediately picked up by rival Network Ten. It began screening on that channel in early 1986 and has remained popular with its core teenage audience ever since. The show was created by Reg Watson and is produced by the Reg Grundy Organisation.

The series follows the daily lives of several families who live in the fictional Ramsay Street, Erinsborough – although in fact it is restricted to the small cul-de-sac of six houses at the end of the street – and includes the usual soap staples of births, deaths, and marriages. The show features a regular turnover of attractive young actors mixed in with the more stable cast of older people. Though it is not commonly mentioned so as to not alienate viewers in other Australian cities, Erinsborough (nearly an anagram of 'Our Neighbours') is undoubtedly supposed to be a suburb of Melbourne. The show is filmed in Melbourne, and for street scenes uses Pin Oak Court in Vermont South, a suburb in eastern Melbourne. Erinsborough is often contrasted with the neighbouring, and equally fictitious, suburb of Eden Hills. Other locations often mentioned (and sometimes seen) in the show include West Waratah, Waratah Heights and Anson's Corner.

Many successful Australian actors and singers had some of their earliest work on Neighbours, including Kylie Minogue, Jesse Spencer, Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe (brief guest appearance), Natalie Imbruglia, Jason Donovan, Holly Valance, Mark Little, Radha Mitchell, Delta Goodrem and Natalie Bassingthwaighte. Actor Alan Dale who had previously starred in The Young Doctors, played the central character of Jim Robinson for the show's first seven years and is now a recognisable star in US series such as 24 and The O.C.. One of the most enduring characters currently on the show is Harold Bishop, played by actor Ian Smith who has also written many of the scripts for the show.

Neighbours celebrated its 20th Anniversary in 2005 with a special episode which featured appearances from several former members of the cast.

Neighbours internationally
The show is also popular in the United Kingdom where it quickly gained a cult following after it began to be broadcast there in 1986. BBC One began by screening it at lunchtime, but it was soon given an early evening repeat slot by controller Michael Grade on the advice of his daughter. In the late 1980s it regularly had a UK audience in the tens of millions and was sometimes watched by more people than the population of Australia at that time. The episodes in the UK are now generally shown between one and three months after they are seen in Australia, as the BBC often removes the show from its schedule during major sports tournaments such as Wimbledon and bank holidays in order to take into account the fact that the show usually takes a four week break over the Christmas/New Year in Australia for the Southern Hemisphere summer. Accounting for the duplication of viewers across its two UK showings a day, the show rates on average over five million viewers a day, making it arguably the highest rated commonwealth import on British television.

It also airs every evening on Irish TV station RTÉ Two at 5.30. These episodes are also about three months behind the Australian network.

The show has also been sold to networks in many other countries. Episodes from 1999 were aired for a six-week trial basis on the American channel Oxygen in March of 2004. At first, it was shown in the afternoon opposite higher-rated American soaps such as The Young and the Restless and All My Children, which gave the show anemic ratings from the first airing; the people who would be most interested in the show were watching other, more established serials. After a couple of weeks, the show moved to a late-night time slot and eventually left the air entirely. It was the sixth Australian soap opera to be aired in the United States (The Sullivans, Prisoner, Home and Away, Paradise Beach and Pacific Drive are the other five).

It has been long aired by Television New Zealand and screens twice daily at 5:05am and 5:00pm.

A Great Late actor/rapper shot dead in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting, releasing many albums posthumously, his suspicious tragic death is of great concern and nearly ten years later the homicide has remained unsolved.

An American sitcom starring John Ritter most popular before his untimely passing in 2003. ran from 2002 to 2005 on the ABC in America, ABC1 in the UK and Channel 7 in Australia. The shows storylines were about a family patriarch named Paul Hennessy trying to stop his daughters from growing up too fast mainly in dating. Retitled 8 Simple Rules after John Ritter's death. a.k.a A Few Simple Rules (working title)

A talented American actor who portrayed Jack Tripper in Three's Company and Paul Hennessy in 8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter. He was born on the 17th September 1948 and died on 11th September 2003 of an aortic dissection. Will be forever remembered

The UK's longest-running soap opera, premiered in 1960, entertaining quality television from Britain

An Australian Broadcast television network formed in 1965.

History:
The network, formed in 1965, was initially dubbed the Independent Television Network or ITN but in 1972 adopted the name the 0-10 Network which reflected the channel 0 and 10 frequencies that it broadcast at the time. In the early 1990s TEN also referred to itself by the acronym "The Entertainment Network" in network promotions.

In 1980, the 0-10 Network became known as Network Ten to reflect ATV-0's transition to ATV-10 - although the Brisbane station continued to broadcast as TVQ-0 until 1988.

In 1987, Adelaide's SAS-10 gave ADS-7 the hands of the Ten Network (as ADS-10).

It was nearly folded into the Seven Network in the early 1990s, but due to the lobbying power of billionaire Kerry Packer, owner of the Nine Network, this was successfully resisted.

In 2005, it was revealed CanWest was in discussions with newspaper publisher John Fairfax Holdings about a possible sale of the network, after the federal government had indicated it may consider relaxing Australia's media cross-ownership laws. Currently, newspaper owners cannot own television stations in the same city. Fairfax owned the Seven Network until the mid 1980s, and has been looking for a way back into television for a long time.

The Ten Network is Australia's most profitable station, mostly due to tight spending habits. Its main focus is on viewers under 40 and for the last four ratings years has won this demographic, in spite of being the lowest rating of the 3 commercial Australian television stations overall.

The Ten Network has headquarters in the Sydney suburb of Pyrmont, which is where all national news programming and the network feed are broadcast from.