The government has put $80 million behind TVNZ to launch two new free to air channels. The first will be a 24 hour news channel to be launched before the end of next year, and the second will be a family/childrens/arts/drama channel.

The thing is, this money is helping to make these channels ad free.

Though, CanWest isn’t happy - it wants money too. However, for one TVNZ is a public broadcaster, which is also meant to run as a commercial one too. Also, the CEO Rick Ellis had said in the announcement yesterday that TVNZ had to fight to get the money. Was CanWest fighting?

Either way, this will be good (24 hour news? I’m there!). It would be interesting to see the family channel and how much that would change the current TVOne and 2 that TVNZ already run, it would probably mean less New Zealand programming on those two as they get shuffled on the new digital channel.

Can New Zealand, however, have a large enough market to warrant a 24 hour news channel, with news updates on the hour, every hour?