Tvnz — Tag

TVNZ has announced that it will be going into the online era from March next year with TVNZ ondemand. You’ll be able to watch new, old and catch up programmes that are shown or yet to be shown on TV, with many being free (such as news or archived shows) or $2 to $4 (like Shortland Street).

TVNZ has lead the way in New Zealand by being the first to offer streaming news reports. This year it has stepped up by offering ASB Business and Fair Go as podcasts, it also last week offered the first episode of Karaoke High from TVNZ.co.nz for free since last Monday, but it was shown on TV2 tonight. Also, other shows like Eating Media Lunch have been available.

From the sounds of it, you will be able to download the episodes or watch them streaming. They hope to have most of their popular shows available online, such as Shortland Street and Eating Media Lunch. Unfortunately, it sounds like you pay to watch it an unlimited amount of times from seven days of purchasing the license. If you want to watch it again after that, you’ll have to pay again. That is the only black mark I can think of with this (that and the fact that it only works with Windows at the moment).

A quick clip shown at the end of the press event touted the content being accessible from laptops, iPods, Xbox 360’s, PSP’s and cellphones. The video can be watched from the linked article, going into the first video clip into about 17 minutes, or watch the snippets from the One News clip.

It is about time we had this, however it isn’t like we are the last off the mark on this one.

Our TV2 reception is bad where we live, so I wait until Monday to get my Eating Media Lunch fix online.

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?