House Rules won't take on The Block Octagonal

Channel Seven program chief Angus Ross has revealed that a new series of House Rules, already filmed and originally slated to screen in late 2015, won’t go to air this year.

The move comes as part of a major shake-up at the network, which will also see them dumping Million Dollar Minute from its afternoon time slot.

Its program chief Angus Ross acknowledged that the next House Rules would struggle competing against The Block in the planned 7.30pm timeslot.

"We've got a series [completed] but I don’t think the genre matching that has occurred this year has helped anyone," he told News Ltd.

"Do I think House Rules versus The Block is going to be a good outcome for us or for audiences? No. I don’t think it would be a win for anyone."

The Mumbrella website wrote one of the issues that has annoyed media buyers was the big networks putting similar shows up against each other. 

In recent years Seven and Nine have faced off with The Voice vs X Factor, House Rules vs Reno Rumble and The Hotplate vs Restaurant Revolution.

Mumbrella advised at last week’s revenue announcement Nine’s sales boss Peter Wiltshire acknowledged this had hit the bottom line for the network.

“(In quarter four) Nine’s ratings were impacted by the two leading networks programming formats being in the same genre head to head.

"To some extent we were our own worst enemy as we competed aggressively,” said Wiltshire.

“This caused pressure on audiences on free-to-air TV and specifically Nine’s share of that audience.

"The size and magnitude of these changes coincided with advertisers moving to shorter term buying decisions and immediate ratings history to support their actions. 

"This clearly worked against us as buyers worked to Q3 ratings in allocating Q4 revenues.”