I can confirm that in Australia SBS (a government owned TV channel) has played the show every New Years Eve at 6.10pm for 30 years and everyone I knew always watched it before heading out to celebrations.
This isn’t the first time doing this - at the start of the pandemic they also closed the accounts of travel and hospitality businesses en masse. They tried to win us back once the vaccine was out and business was booming but we’d lost any trust in their reliability by then.
https://www.sbs.com.au/guide/article/2016/12/19/broadcast-sb...