TAB cost cutting is about to hit racing's Trackside television channel with scores of redundancies, the axing of most shows, and reduced raceday coverage.

And the impending cuts have industry leaders worried the channel, racing's shop window, will become a turnoff for viewers with little more than wall-to-wall racing from obscure overseas venues.

The job losses will hit everyone from senior managers to the newest recruits, as New Zealand Racing Board bosses try to save $12 million in the wake of declining betting turnover.

The knife has gone through every sector of the board's operations, but Head of Broadcasting Glen Broomhall had the unenviable task last week of calling meetings with a raft of TV workers who will lose their jobs.

Top Canterbury harness presenter Justin Le Lievre is one of the most high-profile people to lose his position, his knowledge of the code and its participants deemed dispensable given the channel plans to cut all interviewing on Trackside at the Trials and to drop the weekly review show Box Seat Retro.

North Island broadcast manager Bill Harman has been shown the door after 11 years, his skills of organising the logistics of big racedays no longer required, given coverage of even the biggest carnivals is being scaled back. His southern counterpart, Keith Hopgood, is also out.

Respected northern floor manager Mark Claydon, a veteran of 22 years, and the central districts' Adrian Jones are also expected to take their redundancy packages, along with a host of producers, with the TAB deciding it can no longer afford to have a presenter on course at midweek meetings.

Only selected Friday, Saturday and Sunday meetings will be hosted by on-course frontmen, unless clubs can afford to pay for their own presenter.

The next generation of workers has also been affected, with trainees Jayne Ivil and Jason Teaz among those singled out.

Ivil, best known as the former strapper of champion mare Seachange, will lose her job unless she agrees to move to Wellington, and Teaz's dreams of becoming a commentator have been floored as the money has dried up so has his training, he was last seen manning a television camera.

Broomhall would not respond to questions about the lost personnel, believed to number more than 30, and the board's new chief executive Andrew Brown would say only the board had started "a consultation process with employees around the proposed changes."