Posts by Russell Brown
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Deborah's take sums up how I feel about the moral issues very, very well, so I no longer feel compelled to write anything about it.
Wow. That's a prodigious piece of blogging. Everyone should read it.
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Oh, oh, sorry Russell. Get rid of the one of mine which quotes it, too. :)
Done.
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Grant Dexter: I've deleted your post referring to anon, and I'm only sorry I was out and didn't spot it sooner.
If you don't like that, feel free to fuck off.
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I guess that's what happens when you can just add channels whenever you choose, and all they do is show some particular event. A luxury TVNZ doesn't have.
Quite. Until we turn off analog TV, there's not a lot more spectrum to go around. Sky, on the other hand, has ye olde buttload of transponder space on the Optus satellite, with an option to buy more. No oneelse will be able to get any.
The risks of Sky being both the sole transmission provder and its own most favoured customer should be obvious. I don't buy TVNZ's call for a forced separation of those two roles -- Freeview itself is the correct intervention, because it's a rational move to a modern use of spectrum that can then be resold for the public benefit. It worked in Britain.
It's also probably worth noting that the business commentators running down Freeview and implying a Sky monopoly is good by them are roughly the same people who spent the 90s sticking up for Telecom.
What's it cost a broadcaster to be allowed to cover the Olympics?
Heaps.
I'm guessing it's pretty exorbitant, given that the Games' prime purpose these days is as an advertising vehicle. Is TVNZ locked out of covering '12 because Sky will be there?
It'll get news, and have its own correspodent there, but that'll be it. But Sky has had to promise the IOC that there will be a reasonable free-to-air offering, and I don't think the IOC will regard Prime-on-a-Sky -box as real free-to-air. Freeview has an installed base of 100,000 already, and growth will continue to pick up. There are about 5000 people using FTA-only boxes they've bought from Sky. The fact is, Prime will be on Freeview by 2010. What else happens around that, I don't know.
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Mmmm As usual it sounds as if SKY have done their homework and will provide a superior product. I don't think Freeview will have a PVR with intelligence out till late this year or even next year.
It should be late this year, and it won't be as friendly as the MySky because nothing is.
Rumours are that TV3 which are supposed to have two more channels on Freeview by end of this year may well consider walking away from Freeview and do a deal with SKY. If that happens where would that leave Government plans to try and force Freeview as the replacement of analogue TV.
I don't believe it. That TV3 wants to be on Sky and Freeview is obvious -- and why not? But to walk away from the Freeview consortium, where it has a real stake, and mortgage its future to Sky alone wouldn't make sense.
As I said, from about now, TVs start shipping with integrated Freeview decoders -- in (hopefully) five years' time, Freeview will be TV. Most of the growth in Freeview in Britain now is in such integrated sets. The sooner we get to analog switch-off and all that spectrum being inefficiently used by analog broadcast can be freed up, the better.
I actually don't think TVWorks' problem is Freeview transmission costs -- it's how to profitably run the new channels it is committed to launching (as their programmer has noted, porn would work in a commercial sense). They, perhaps rightly, resent the fact that the state broadcaster has tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to do so, and they don't.
Freeview seem to me to have missed the bus by not having a MYSKY equivalent at launch date.
I have one, but it doesn't have the official Freeview EPG and it's a satellite decoder. The boxes available later in the year will be Freeview HD ones.
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If there is "zero" chance of the expenditure not being declared why is Labour refusing to confirm that?
I thought they had. Doesn't the presence of the authorisation identify the leaflet as advertising? (Seriously, correct me if I'm wrong.)
And Clark's office says all advertising will be declared under the spending cap.
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Russell, could you amend your post so my surname is spelt correctly, please? "Mc" not "Mac".
Duh. Done.
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I would think all the Parliamentary parties will do this to one degree or another this year.
Labour obviously decided it wanted to maximise any boost from the Budget, and it has broken no rule in doing so. The leaflet is properly authorised as an election advertisement and there is zero chance of the expenditure not being declared. The provenance of the photograph is a non-issue.
But this is bloody obviously a political risk, and I suspect it will rebound on them.
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Oh; and a question for anyone with a Mac - have you been able to get 3 News' live stream to go? Im stuck watching One News and its driving me mental.
Im sure i've got Flip4Mac installed correctly, but whenever I go to their live page nothing happens even though the player loads.
I get the same thing -- although not on all clips, oddly.
There is a complicated workaround: what I do is view the page source, look around for the relevant .wmv file, copy it, choose "Open URL" in QuickTime (with Flip4Mac installed) and paste in the URL. The clip duly loads.
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Note that even then you do not have a definite future human. It has been calculated that probably 40% or so of human conceptions fail to implant (a whole new process). Etc, etc, etc.
Quite. And even when a foetus is miscarried, far, far beyond the stage of implantation, no one holds a funeral
You could say that a permanent holocaust afflicts most of the "babies" conceived. But that wouldn't make any sense.
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