Tvnz — Tag

Freeview terrestrial service will be differentiated with the name Freeview|HD. This is a good idea and reduce the confusion between what the satellite service provides and the terrestrial service provides.

Meanwhile there is going to be three new channels for Freeview, bringing the total television channels to 13. The first is TVNZ 7, the new factual channel from TVNZ. It will have news on the hour, every hour from 9am to 11pm each day, and on weekdays have a “breakfast zone” of rolling news bulletins from 6am to 9am. The 8pm news will be one hour long and will reportedly provide more depth than One News at 6pm. Available from 30th March. TVNZ 7

Te Reo, or what was previously known as Maori Television Rua, will be a channel only in Maori language (hence the name, for international readers, Te Reo means “the language”). It will only run for three hours a day to start with, but will eventually be extended. Available from 28th March. Maori Television (No UTF-8 support in WordPress??)

TVCentral is only going to be available in Waikato/Bay of Plenty area as it’s the first regional channel to jump onto the Freeview bandwagon (that’s slow moving). It will also only be available on Freeview|HD for now too, so available sometime in April, though if you have a UHF aerial in Waikato/BoP you can pick it up already. TVCentral

TVNZ have signed a deal with Disney-ABC to distribute television programmes via it’s online service, TVNZ OnDemand.

For starters, they’ll have Brothers and Sisters, What About Brian, Criminal Minds, Daybreak and The Amazing Race All Stars available for download. New episodes will be available just 24 hours after their release, and will follow the same pricing structure as current New Zealand-made shows. More shows will be available later.

• TVNZ OnDemand
• Read the press release

TVNZ need to start broadcasting these shows much sooner however. TV3 has already committed itself to broadcasting US shows within a couple of weeks of the original US air date to curb illegal downloading, yet TVNZ still seems bent on having shows broadcast much later – for example, TV3 are showing Heroes just two weeks out, while TVNZ started showing the final series of The Sopranos when the series ended in the States. Also wouldn’t mind seeing Torchwood soon!

TVNZ have released more details on their HD launch next year. To sum up:

• It will be on Freeview DTT only, Sky will not be able to receive the content, nor will the current Freeview Satellite service. Freeview DTT will be available from March next year.
• 50% of content on TV One will be in HD, 80% on TV2.
• It will be 720p (the current standard from HDTV) and surround sound will be broadcast when available. SD content will be upscaled.
• TVNZ6, TVNZ7 and TVNZ Sport Extra will not go HD.

They have the technical stuff, MPEG-4 using the H.246 ABC codec, 23 Mbps and statistical multiplexing 2 HD channels with 3 SD ones.

Time to get me an HD ready TV

It has been announced on Throng.co.nz that TVNZ will go High Definition from July 2008.

The up shot of this announcement is that the Beijing Olympics, held in August next year, will also be broadcast in HD on TV One.

As Freeview Terrestrial service will be the only one that can support HD at this stage, you’ll need a Freeview DVB-T box (from March 2008). And of course an HD-TV.

Remember, next year the Playstation 3 is getting a DVB-T tuner too…

TV One recently brought back veteran weather presenter Jim Hickey and he’s been on this week. He brought back what he took with him when he left – interesting weather reporting. And it appears that the youth on Bebo (said like I’m not apart of the youth anymore ) approve, they started a Jim Hickey Appreciation Club, some comments,

SOOOO great that Jims back on TV1, I’m not watching TV3 again!

Jim Rocks and I love him!!!

Give me Jim over Toni Marsh anyday lol!I bet Jim will boost TV1 weather ratings!YAH!

omg for realz? yaaaaaaay only watched the news coz of jimmy..

But would a return of an old favourite bring fortune back to One News? As Morph points out TV One’s weather presentation needs some work (and apparently that is still coming). He also says that they can’t depend on Jim Hickey and Karen Olson forever, but 3News had the guys watching for Toni Marsh for a while. Only time can tell, they can only improve on ratings these days.

• Jim Hickey Appreciation Club on Bebo

TVNZ, TV3, Maori TV and Sky News have all agreed to go against parts of the new rules that were voted on in parliament which essentially banned use of images and videos of MPs for satirical use.

They accept that they will be held in contempt of parliament if they do, but they all agree that the new rules are undemocratic.

“This is not an issue of MPs versus the television media; it’s about New Zealanders being denied a particular viewpoint on New Zealand politics,” [TVNZ Head of News and Current Affairs, Anthony] Flannery says.

All these MPs seem to forget that anyone can see them anyway if they go to the debating chamber. I was thinking maybe someone should set up an open blog for anyone to post up what they saw of MPs that day. No images, of course, but at least people would still know if David Benson-Pope was sleeping on the job again!

TVNZ has announced an Australasian first by making a deal with Google to put its own content on YouTube.

The channel will show clips of popular TVNZ shows such as One News, Close Up and Shortland Street from TVNZ onDemand.

This goes in line with TVNZ’s on-every-screen strategy that started with the onDemand website. However, it still needs to get a bit beyond the computer screen if that’s to happen – perhaps by removing the DRM off downloaded video from onDemand and making free shows available to download too? (Currently, free content only plays in the embedded flash player and paid content lasts seven days unless you pay up again.)

Telecom T3G customers have been able to get certain TVNZ content on their mobiles for some time now.

• TVNZ onDemand on YouTube

At long last, C4 is to start running 24 hours a day on Freeview and Sky Digital from 7th July. About time.

And at the end of July, TV One and TV2 will be going widescreen.

Time to use that student loan to buy an HDTV I think

I have TVNZ.co.nz as my homepage. It’s neat, compact and lets me know what I’m missing on TV as well as the news. Of course, if you are one to have it as your homepage you do see how often the website breaks. Usually, it is just single sections, for example, when they update the news block you get the “an error has occurred” message in that section.

Rarely, though, do you see them completely screw up.

I haven’t seen a website that does this so regularly. Maybe they should divert cutting staff at TVNZ Interactive (as far as I’m aware, they are already tight on staff anyway).

The website is long due for an update - all the other news websites have in the past six months.

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.