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Imparja Television sacks 14 staff, moves TV operations to New South Wales

The Alice Springs-based Imparja Television has retrenched 14 staff members as part of a restructure of their operations.

The media company will outsource technical broadcast operations to a New South Wales company, partly owned by the ABC.

Chief executive Alistair Feehan said Imparja's own facility's need to be upgraded, but that was prohibitively expensive.

"The cost of doing that is $3.5 million to $4 million," he said.

"We can't work a business model that would make that viable to keep going."

Mr Feehan said it had been a difficult day for the company and its staff.

"No one likes to see those things happen but at the end of the day we have to do what we need to do to keep the business viable and operational," he said.

The bulk of the sackings has come from the operations area, Mr Feehan said.

"We've also lost people in IT, engineering and production as a result of this," he said.

"Everybody's feeling pretty poorly."

The retrenched staff will continue to work until the changes come into effect on January 6.

Mr Feehan said Imparja was the last TV company in Australia to handle its own TV operations, and had only been able to stay wholly in Alice Springs because of increased efficiencies.

"It's got to a point now where we can't find anymore of those efficiencies and we now need to take a big step which is remove part of the broadcast from here," he said.

Mr Feehan said the cuts would not impact local news updates or the children's program Yamba's Playtime.

Imparja would start looking at buying other regional TV stations to expand its business, Mr Feehan said.

"What this will do is allow us to get to that position much quicker than we would have," he added.

Mr Feehan said it was a small response to huge changes in the media industry.

"You just don't know where technology is going to go, and as technology changes you end up in a situation where you are obliged to make the best of the technology on the day, and as that happens you move with the times," he said.

"Technology on one hand is fantastic, it provides efficiencies, but unfortunately some of those efficiencies happen to be human capital."

Mr Feehan said other media had also changed in the town, with now newspapers being printed in Alice Springs and one going solely online.