Posts by izogi
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Hard News: On Telly, Telly Off, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Hi Kyle.
I’m surprised that so many people use the signal to the tower rather than the signal to the satelitte. Is that through choice because it offers more, or avoiding the cost of installing a dish on the house?
For us several years ago, in a rental home, installing a satellite dish would have been a pain without a benevolent landlord. The UHF reception worked “well enough”, and when we went TV shopping at that time, we discovered that if you wanted a tuner built-into the device, you’re basically chained to terrestrial. And sometimes it’s nice to be able to have things built-in, for things like using a TV’s own channel changing functionality. Are there any TVs on the market today which have built-in Freeview satellite decoders? (There weren’t a few years ago, at least.)
Even yesterday, when we were definitely shopping for a separate box, it looked as if the only satellite ones available were those specifically designed for Freeview-via-satellite and not much else. They might have an internal HDD for recording functionality if you’re lucky, and it would cut down your options a lot. There’s some variety in New Zealand beyond DishTV offerings (which come with very mixed online reviews about their usability if you want to do anything other than watching live TV), but not much. If we wanted anything else without buying an additional box, like a certain amount of useful internet connectivity, all those units from the likes of Samsung, Panasonic, and so on, only seem to come with terrestrial UHF tuners.
It’s totally possible that our experience is different from other people’s, and I’m keen to know what else is out there. I was on the edge of trying to build my own MythTV box instead of relying on the commercial offerings, but decided it’s probably more of a hobby for later after some research. We’ve had so much happening lately that we’ve really not had much time to research the modern local market.
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Hard News: On Telly, Telly Off, in reply to izogi,
and getting some dodgy terrestrial reception with the channel scans, despite being in J’ville and having direct line-of-sight to the top of the transmitter on Kaukau
For fairness I should also add that there doesn't appear to be any antenna on the roof of the 5 year old rental that we shifted into, despite having two TV outlet thingees in the main room and one in a bedroom, so presumably with cabling in the walls. We'll really need to ask the landlord about that, who conveniently also built the place. It might just be an issue of mounting a better antenna in somewhere.
There's a satellite dish on the roof (and additional corresponding outlets inside), but if our hardware even worked with a dish to begin with, I've also read on NZ's FreeView website that you can only get HD FreeView via terrestrial.
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I’m not sure how many CRT sets are still out there – you can’t even give them to op shops these days – let alone vintage cabinets from the 70s stuck on TV One, but Tim’s right, they’ll be out there.
I think there must still be a fair few, given the reaction you can still see on the Stuff comment threads whenever there’s a mention of (eg) prisons getting flat screen televisions in their common areas…. as if the "flat screen" part of a TV is somehow more of a luxury for prisoners than the dollar savings on retail, energy and maintenance are for taxpayers over a CRT.
We’ve had a UHF-capable digital TV for ages, took it to Australia and bought a PVR there, and yesterday we bought our first PVR here. We’re still figuring things out, and getting some dodgy terrestrial reception with the channel scans, despite being in J'ville and having direct line-of-sight to the top of the transmitter on Kaukau.
It’s a bit of a disappointment how NZ’s Freeview certification requires that approved PVR manufacturers to arbitrarily cripple things like time-skip buttons. We bought ourselves this Samsung thing which has some useful internetty features to go with the twin terrestrial tuners, but which it also seems can only fast-forward or rewind at about a fixed 3x realtime speed. It’s only day one. Hopefully I’m missing something.
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Hard News: Moving on, in reply to Myles Thomas,
Building audiences takes a long, long time and TVOne is still to some degree the natural audience for public service tv.
Is this as true in the digital TV age as it used to be, now that electronic guides are immediately available on the TV (or decoder box) and it's easy to switch between them? I can't actually remember the last time I set the channel on a TV without flipping across the electronic programme guide. It was probably in a motel somewhere without anything digital.
I'm mostly going on Aussie experience as I haven't had a chance to get re-acquainted in NZ since returning, plus I only have my own introspective experience to go on meaning it's hardly valid. But anecdotally I find that I often barely know which channel I'm watching, between identifying a programme and switching to it, or otherwise flagging it to record for later viewing. The PVR doesn't even remember which channel it nabbed something on, when I look it up later, although it records the time. I'd have thought that TV1's biggest advantage besides its actual programmes, in this day and age, might that it's often ordered at the top of the list much more than any historic reputation.
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Hard News: Moving on, in reply to Russell Brown,
A key problem, I think, was that every viewer we lured over to the public broadcasting content was a viewer lost to the commercial channels.
I was disappointed with the way that TVNZ6 and TVNZ7 were both killed, based upon claims about viewership, before digital TV was a requirement for all televisions in a household. I guess we'll never know how many people, who are only now being forced to go fully digital, would begin watching 6 and 7 frequently if they were still available.
It was always going to be a political decision, but I couldn't help but feel that 6 and 7 never had a fair opportunity to prove that their alternative content was worthwhile and popular on the same scale as commercial TV, for at least as long as there was no guarantee that anyone with any TV in front of them could flip to them or record them as fluidly as other content. Having just a single decoder in the house also doesn't fully count, especially if it's stuck on a main-room TV that gets monopolised by a person wanting to watch something else.
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Hard News: Moving on, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Why should Three and NZoA keep putting money into (excellent) local dramas and comedies like Hounds, Harry, and The Almighty Johnsons, when more people apparently are interested in watching repeats of some Irish drag queen telling fanny gags?
I don't always think they should if nobody's watching them, but I'm curious to to know if the Irish drag queen demographic for so many broadcasters is what it is because that's what the majority of kiwis actually want to watch, or if it's merely because it's the most marketable, loosely spending, low-risk demographic at which to programme and sell advertising.
When the commercial criteria for funding a production doesn't necessarily match with the criteria and numbers of people who'd view it, or if there's some other general benefit that might not naturally go directly back to a commercial broadcaster, I think there's still a good case for a public broadcasting model.
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Hard News: Moving on, in reply to Sacha,
Though the closest we have to a public broadcaster right now is Maori Television.
I've recently returned from a couple of years in Australia, knowing in advance that NZ public television was having a bad time. What I didn't expect so much, after crusing my parents' Sky channels, was that even the paid TV looks very wanting for consistent diverse quality content. So far, aside from the very occasional sparodic encounter, the only channel I've found myself consistently returning to is Maori TV. Programmes like My Country Song are just classically awesome in their simplicity. What a gem compared with all that screaming aggressive competition stuff put up and imported by other broadcasters!
Does every other accessible television broadcaster in NZ chase the same demographic with the likes of home renovation shows, screaming cooking shows, and extremely over-commentated "world's blahiest blah!" types of documentaries these days?
Fortunately there are plenty of more important reasons why NZ trumps Australia for where I want to live, but I already miss the SBS and ABC networks, even despite the lack of on-screen NZ culture, which I seriously missed.
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Legal Beagle: Dewey Defeats Truman; or…, in reply to Clarke,
The DomPost has reported it now, albeit late.
On Sunday the WCC Watch blog (kind'a biased in its own way) speculated that upon questioning by the DomPost, John Morrison simply denied that anything actually happened. Not that this is a good excuse to avoid investigating further if it were deemed newsworthy. There was hardly a lack of witnesses.
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Legal Beagle: Dewey Defeats Truman; or…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
talking about counting in preferential systems - the current reporting in the press of the labour leader result...
Trying to report preferential results as a flat percentage seems very dodgy to me in general, given how systems like STV will stop counting for each candidate once the candidate has crossed a known threshold.
eg. The Herald reported that David Cunliffe won the Labour Leadership with 51.15%, which isn't strictly true. David Cunliffe had won automatically with his 51.15% by the first round because 50% was a mathematically unassailable threshold for three candidates, which is probably why the Labour Party website reports it as a final result from round one, but it's not very representative of the final tally after round 2 which shows that after Shane Jones was knocked out, David Cunliffe had far more preferential support (albeit after the weightings) over his closest rival than a mere 51%.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to BenWilson,
I found the Myer Briggs analysis useful when done on myself, by myself.
Is that possible? I remember reading many years ago that one of the things about the MBTI is that it can only be administered by a qualified person, in part, I think, because of the ease with which a result can be misinterpreted and used in the wrong way. I’m wondering if you mean something like the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which was a very similar set of questions once published in a book about personalities.
Back in the day when I was really fascinated by all of this stuff to the extent of joining mailing lists full of “like-minded people” on the internet, I ended up finding an evening course (at Wellington High) on personalities using the MBTI, and where the trainer administered it to participants properly. I went into that test knowing exactly which personality I wanted to be, and I totally nailed it to the extent that the course instructor was holding me up as an example of one of the more clearly defined personalities. An interesting effect, in hindsight, of my getting hung up in the whole idea in a way that was probably not very healthy or useful at the time.
As others have said, I think the greatest thing about this type of stuff is to gain a better understanding of how there are actually different types of people out there, and that judging someone because they see or approach something in a different way from yourself is not always helpful.
It’s also often more about personality than ability. Making critical presumptions about a person’s abilities, based on their personality (if it’s safe to even assume a test is accurate), seems like a very dodgy business.
But hey, many psychometric tests probably aren’t all personality tests, plus I’m not a psychologist, an HR person, or a manager.