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Some cool stuff so you won't miss me | Nov 21, 2008 09:16

I'm going to be busy at the SPADA conference for most of the day, leading up to a special Media7 show on the future of screen, and life during the credit crunch, that closes proceedings. But I'm such a dude that I've compiled a bunch of cool stuff so you won't miss me.

Recently added to NZ On Screen: an excerpt from the Denis Glover doco Between the Lines, in which the poet explains his decision as a student that "I would not work for printing machines -- printing machines would work for me".

Also: all four episodes of Moa's Ark, the four-part 1990 series on New Zealand natural history, fronted by David Bellamy and produced by the old Natural History Unit.

Damian and I interviewed Colin Mitchell, one of the creators of AucklandFuckingCity.com, for tomorrow's Public Address Radio (5pm, Radio Live). The website is tasteless and irresponsible. I rather like it.

The website for Luke Buda's Special Surprise album is the kind of over-the-top Flash creation we're all supposed to hate. But it's really very well done -- funny and lovely.

Ana Samways has yet another blog of diversions and distractions drawn from the internet. This one's Not Really News.

Leo found this for me at I Can Has Cheezburger:

That's one cool kitty.

Also, a very droll video in which the surviving Monty Python members explain their response to being widely pirated on YouTube -- putting up their own damn YouTube channel, with better-quality clips:

And last but not least, Andrew Spraggon, aka Sola Rosa, has completed a new album, Get It Together (after three and a half years' work!). It's not due for release until February, but the first single, 'Del Ray' (which is kinda Ennio Morricone-on-a-Caribbean-holiday cool) went out to DJs and radio stations this week.

It also goes out to you.

Just pop over to the new Sola Rosa website and click on the "Check it here" link in the blog. That takes you to the Sola Rosa bandcamp page, where you can download 'Del Ray' in a variety of formats: MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Apple Lossless. That's pretty nice. If you grab the track, maybe you could leave Andrew a word of thanks at his blog.

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Will they make O'Reilly sweat? | Nov 20, 2008 08:20

The Irish Times has a useful story about the backdrop to Tony O'Reilly's bid to sell his company's 39.1% stake in APN, the company that owns a decent chunk of our media landscape. The key thing to look for is that the O'Reilly-controlled Independent News and Media has a €300 million bond due for redemption in May, 2009.

If INM doesn't have the money from a sale by then, O'Reilly will be forced to look at a rights issue to raise cash -- at which point his dissident shareholder, Denis O'Brien, will pounce, and attempt to seize control of INM.

Any potential buyer might decide to make O'Reilly sweat to drive down the price even further than it has fallen since institutional investors rejected a sale at $A6.20 a share in May last year. APN shares are now trading under $3.

Our longstanding media institutions -- the Herald, the Listener, The Radio Network (two of three of them once owned by the New Zealand public) -- can only bend in the financial wind. I gather yet more cost-cutting is underway at the print publications -- athough I suppose it's a mercy that there's nothing of the order of the shedding of 90 jobs (including 60 of the paper's 230 journalists) at O'Reilly's vanity paper, The Independent, in London.

Meanwhile, as Rupert Murdoch lays into newspapers for losing contact with their readers, things aren't exactly dandy in his empire either.

Dan Rather's lawsuit against his old employers at CBS is either sheer folly or the stuff of Hollywood movies. But what he has forced CBS to hand over -- memos showing that CBS let the Republican Party vet the "independent" panel that would stand in judgement over Rather's story on George W. Bush's Air National Guard service. Best part:

Another memorandum turned over to Mr. Rather's lawyers by CBS was a long typed list of conservative commentators apparently receiving some preliminary consideration as panel members, including Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. At the bottom of that list, someone had scribbled "Roger Ailes," the founder of Fox News.

This week's Media7 looked at the conflict in Afghanistan, and the way it's reported -- or not -- in domestic media. The panel features David Beatson, who has been pursuing real stories for Pundit.co.nz, including this one about what may have constituted a Geneva Conventions breach by New Zealand forces. Also, our own Damian Christie -- who actually got to Afghanistan under his own steam last year -- and Pundit founder Tim Watkin.

I feel bound to note that Beatson's claim -- and subsequently ours on the show -- that the seven years New Zealand troops have been in Afghanistan represents the New Zealand military's longest foreign deployment. Our forces were in Bosnia for 12 years on a formal basis and 15 years all-up. You could certainly contend that Bosnia wasn't a war zone all that time -- while Afghanistan, even around Bamiyan where our people are, just gets nastier and more dangerous. But as a bald statement, it's wrong. Sorry.

Update: David B observes:

Bosnia was an international intervention in a civil war. We entered it in 1992 by providing 9 UN military observers after a peace agreement had been signed between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims. We comitted 250 troops to Bosnia in 1994 after a flare-up in the civil conflict. The majority of those troops returned to NZ in 1996.

We entered Afghanistan as part of a full-throated war of invasion in which the established government [Taliban] of Afghanistan - not just the Al Qaeda terrorists were the declared enemy. We came in on the second wave of the invasion to engage in combat not peace-keeping. I guess that's the difference.

So technically Bosnia stays in, but as David points out, the two deployments aren't greatly comparable.

Anyway, the show is here on TVNZ ondemand, and the other versions of the video will be linked from our TVNZ microsite.

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Speaking Freely | Nov 18, 2008 11:03

In the current NBR, my old friend Tom Frewen is predicting doom for TVNZ and the Freeview digital platform under a National government. But before you worry too much, it's helpful to be aware that Tom has written this column quite a few times already.

In July 2006 there was Media aren't asking digital TV questions, where Tom held that the consumer purchase of decoders and TVs was an uncounted cost of the government's digital TV strategy.

In January 2007 there was How long will it take for Freeview to fail? , in which he predicted that "two years, maybe three, should be enough for the drain on public funds to become a source of political embarrassment and controversy."

In October last year it was How digital TV will take us back to the future, quoting a British expert to illustrate a gloomy forecast for commercial digital free-to-air TV -- unless all the Freeview channels went onto to Sky Television, thus rendering any other platform irrelevant.

This week (not online, sorry), he scorns the Freeview broadcasters' decision to launch with the capability for HD TV, which he says ignored advice to the Ministry of Culture and heritage from Spectrum Strategy Consultants that HD had been "slow to take off in even the most sophisticated markets" and "would not become a viable proposition for free-to-air broadcasters until after the analogue signal was switched off."

I don't think so. Last night at 9.10pm, New Zealand's first HD TV commercial, a short spot for Playstation, aired on TV3, and the broadcaster has asked advertisers to deliver ad creative in HD where possible within a couple of months.

Yes, TV3 is in HD on Sky as well as terrestrial Freeview, but the number of Freeview HD decoders and -- more importantly -- TV sets with Freeview tuners built-in is probably in excess of 30,000 (there are another 140,000 or so Freeview satellite receivers). I don't think Sky has anything like that penetration with its MySky HDi PVR, which is currently the only way to view HD pictures on Sky.

With any luck, you can take home your new integrated set, or decoder bundle, home, plug in your aerial and start watching (if you can see Prime, you can see Freeview HD). You don't even need a fancy TV set -- the decoder will plug into nearly any TV new enough to still actually be working, and should deliver markedly better pictures.

MySky HDi will set you back either $599 upfront, or $49 plus $15 a month for as long as you keep the box -- on top of whatever Sky services you buy. With Freeview integrated TV sets plunging below $2000, ordinary HD-capable sets under $1000 and approved Freeview HD receivers retailing for as little as $249 (USB tuner add-ons for PCs starting at about $100) paying more money to Sky doesn't look like such a great idea.

Tom quotes Sky CEO John Fellet as saying that recessions typically cause consumers to rationalise that they can invest in Sky as an aid to staying home and not spending money. Which is true, but it's hard to see why the same doesn't apply to Freeview. Also, if you shell out for a new TV and you don't budget for a digital receiver, you're a mug. If you're spending the money on the TV, you might as well get the pictures that do it justice. Even non-HD programmes on One Two and 3 look markedly better via Freeview because the decoder upconverts them to HD resolution.

It is also true that HD flourishing on free-to-air TV bucks the international experience, but that's because New Zealand's late start allowed us to jump -- for once -- to the next technology. Most digital TV in Europe, for example, is being delivered as a pay service via satellite -- because pay TV is the only environment where the economics of delivering HD via satellite work. But in France, four major FTA channels have just launched in digital HD -- on the same spec as New Zealand Freeview HD. The government there is poised to order TV manufacturers to build in the DTT decoders to all new sets. There's some scale for you.

In other news, Sony's Playstation add-on, PlayTV, has finally launched in Europe and is due here early next year. It turns your PS3 into a DTT Freeview PVR. Unfortunately, it looks a bit sucky so far. Only two tuners, no HD capability, simultaneous recording may slow down gameplay, and there's DRM that means you can't move your programmes to any device but a PSP -- even another Playstation.

There is also, of course, a Zinwell Freeview HD-approved PVR set to reach shops by Christmas, with another to come from Topfield. I doubt either will achieve the matchless ease of use of the MySky, but nothing does. I'm interested to hear from readers about their experience with the USB PC products -- and in particular, the regrettably pricey Eye TV for the Mac.

Anyway, that's enough geekery. Tom's conclusion, as is often the case, is that money has been spent competing with Sky that could simply have been spent on a non-commercial public channel to screen on Sky. But it would be madness to settle for a satellite-only digital TV environment in which the gateway was owned and controlled by Sky TV, along with the very equipment we'd use to view the programmes in our homes.

The presence of Freeview has already obliged Sky to raise its game. The establishment of the Documentary Channel as part of the basic package was an early move, and I think there's no doubt that Freeview encouraged Sky to advance its own HD plans. As things stand, Freeview's pictures are of better technical quality, while Sky, of course, has all the content you may wish to pay for, including sport and a decent movie catalogue in HD.

National's attitude to the standoff between Sky and TVNZ over the offering of TVNZ 6 and 7 for free on Sky, and, in turn, the addition of the Sky-owned Prime to Freeview, will be interesting to see, but I suspect the inclination will be to treat it as what it is -- a commercial dispute that will eventually be resolved on commercial terms.

If anything, National's target for an analogue TV switch-off is more aggressive than Labour's was, and we should hope that a date can be set in 2011 -- because that would free up a huge amount of spectrum for more channels. True, that would fracture audiences still further, and massively multi-channel FTA environments typically contain quite a lot of muck -- but nobody ever wished for less bandwidth. Freeview isn't going away, because quite soon, it will simply be television.

NB: Clearly, I have an interest to declare here, in that I'm the host of a TV show that appears on a Freeview-only channel, but I've been saying these things for a while. I'm also a pretty keen consumer of these platforms. One thing the rollout of flagship HD programming programming is that when the big America series appear in a reasonably timely fashion, and in spanking HD, we are far less inclined to download those programmes, save for a looksee at the Fall season launches. I'm sure we're not alone.

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Pomp and Circumstance | Nov 17, 2008 09:59

Even as you read National's respective support agreements with the Maori Party and the Act Party, can I suggest you listen to each to each too? I suspect the quality of voice in each will have much to say about the way our new government functions over the next three years.

The former, over five pages, moves on from election night in respectful and businesslike fashion, kicking for touch where necessary. The latter is, at times, like being hectored by a drunk.

It is querulous and it is pretentious: an opening "Preamble" is written in language more befitting a constitutional document than a political deal between a small party and a large one.

It is followed by a section headed "PHILOSOPHY" which begins "ACT notes and endorses the National Party's long-held respect for individual freedom, personal responsibility, and sanctity of property rights …" Well, thank goodness that the senior party meets Act's lofty standards, eh?

Act also wins itself the flattering bauble of a presence on a Leadership Council, with Full Initial Capitals.

In terms of detail, there's this:

National and ACT have joint aspirations for greater prosperity for New Zealanders, and see Australia as a benchmark. They have agreed on the concrete goal of closing the income gap with Australia by 2025. This will require a sustained lift in New Zealand's productivity growth rate to 3% a year or more.

Leaving aside the essentially hopeful nature of setting a "concrete goal" four Parliamentary terms hence, as Steve Pierson has already pointed out,"What 'income gap' are they talking about? GDP per capita or wages or what?" It's not a goal, it's a pamphlet.

As No Right Turn notes, there's a certain irony in that fact that even as the document fulminates about the quality of public spending, it creates a new kind of pork: funding of a political party:

To enable ACT to make a substantive contribution to the government's programme, it will have adequate access to funding, in a bulk form or for specific projects, to enable it to commission contract research or other consultancy assistance. The terms of such funding will be a matter for the Leadership Council to decide.

My guess? Your taxes will bankroll "research" and "consultancy assistance" from sundry climate change denialists in pursuit of this first point of the appended terms of reference covering the creation of a special Climate Change Select Committee:

The Committee shall: hear competing views on the scientific aspects of climate change from internationally respected sources and assess the quality and impartiality of official advice.

So the terms of reference for the committee begin by implying that our expert scientific organisations are delivering poor-quality and dishonest advice? John Key has swiftly assured the Herald that the terms as published were written by Act and would by altered once National had input.

Public Address reader Stephen Hill observed thus on the same Herald story:

The incoming National government will completely review the emissions trading scheme (ETS) - possibly including the science that says humans are to blame for climate change.

I hope that there'll also be a review of the whole 'Earth is not flat' malarky. I'm tired of having science rammed down my throat when it is patently obvious to anyone with functioning eyes that the planet isn't even a bit curvy. Seriously, this is simply scary and a 'review' will be a colossal waste of time and money. The scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming. I'm all in favour of inclusive government but you gotta draw a line somewhere - letting people with wilfully ignorant ideas about stuff like this dictate policy is just stupid.

He makes a good point: will the review, and Act's accompanying research pork be subject to the Cabinet Expenditure Control Committee's "elimination" of "programmes that do not deliver value for money"?

Lest, I quibble too much, I think it is obvious that John Key and his advisors have shown great skill and purpose in sealing these agreements to govern in just over a week. In including the Maori Party, they have demonstrated not only tactical nous but a sense of vision. But I can't help but think it's not the Maori Party agreement that we're all going to be talking about.

--

Meanwhile, it's easy to miss when you read the Herald on Sunday story that the bizarre behaviour of new Act list MP David Garrett took place in June, before Act did its deal with the Sensible Sentencing Trust to put him on its list. He was not even a party member at the time.

But he is now, and it can only be hoped that this incident was out of character. He turned up for a recording of Eye to Eye with Willie Jackson so drunk that the producer was called to decide whether the programme should go ahead as planned. It did, and you can watch it here. Garrett slurs his words at times and draws an analogy between homosexuality and paedophilia that does not impress his fellow panelists. His off-camera behaviour was reportedly abusive and obnoxious.

Garrett was somewhat contrite about his behaviour when the HoS called. But the question persists: what kind of moron turns up steaming drunk to participate in a TV discussion on paedophilia?

It's going to be a long three years with this guy, isn't it?

The same HoS story ropes in comments from Jonathan Young, national's new MP in New Plymouth, originally made to the Taranaki Daily News last month and highlighted by GayNZ.

The New Plymouth MP and long-time church minister told the paper about an associate who was an "ex-lesbian" and who had experienced many things in her childhood which caused her to become homosexual.

"One of the things I do strongly object to in terms of the people who have made this choice is the presentation of it as a normal alternative," Young was quoted as saying.

The sad thing is that Young is the son of the late Venn Young, who holds an important place in the gay rights history of New Zealand by dint of introducing the first, unsuccessful, Crimes Amendment Bill to the New Zealand Parliament to decriminalise homosexual intercourse in 1974. The wisdom of the father clearly did not pass to the son.

PS: Media7 this week looks at the reporting we're not getting about Afghanistan. And it's more of a story for us than you might think. On Pundit, David Beatson has written some very interesting stuff based on his OIA requests about New Zealand troops handing over captives to US forces in possible breach of the Geneva Conventions, and on the lack of any end in sight to the longest foreign deployment -- seven years -- in our history. He's on the panel, along with Tim Watkin and Damian Christie (who, you may recall, got to Afghanistan under his own steam last year).

If you'd like to join us for the recording at The Classic tomorrow evening, hit reply and let me know asap.

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