Digital tv — Tag

Well our media center PC is half way done. I put in the components that I have. So now all we need to wait for is the RAM (Thursday), the digital TV card (Wednesday) and for a new graphics card (still to be ordered). So the machine will probably be ready by Friday (as I also need to clear out the old house).

However, the TVNZ channels are moving over to the new Optus D1 satellite on Wednesday and this will take at most three days to complete (three days longer than they expected) because of the error that the satellite went up with. So won’t be of much use until then anyway.

I decided to set it up with Ubuntu, but take out the Gnome and use Blackbox (a lesser load and can run the other apps as well). And because we don’t have broadband, it’ll take all day to download the stuff anyway.

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?