Kiwiblog

A reminder that “Campaign 11″ starts tonight at 8.30 pm on Sky News. It will also replay on Prime TV.

Barry Soper moderates a minor party leader’s debate with:

• ACT Leader Don Brash
• United Future Leader Peter Dunne
• Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia
• Mana Party Leader Hone Harawira
• Green co-leader Russel Norman

The panel asking questions is Chris Trotter, myself and television reporter Ngahuia Wade.

There will be four sections to the debate, focusing on:

1. Economy
2. Environment
3. Maori
4. Coalitions

The programme will run for an hour.

“Campaign 2011″ starts on Sunday at 8.30 pm on Sky News.

Barry Soper moderates a minor party leader’s debate with:

• ACT Leader Don Brash
• United Future Leader Peter Dunne
• Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia
• Mana Party Leader Hone Harawira
• Green co-leader Russel Norman

The panel asking questions is Chris Trotter, myself and television reporter Ngahuia Wade.

Have just downloaded the Sky TV app for the iPad and can see me using it a lot.

The basic app is that it allows you to see the programme guide for the next week, in an easy to follow format. But the real killer part is that once you enter in your account details you can set your My Sky box to record programmes from your iPad.

So you no longer need to be at home to record things. You might be at a friend’s place and see a programme that you want to record. Hit your iPad and it will be recording within seconds back home.

If you forgot to set it in the mornng to record something, you can do it at any stage during the day.

I wil be using this app a lot.

1. Go to watch my favourite programmes and find that the MySky decoder has had a record failure for the last day.
2. Reboot the decoder, and then it comes up with updating listings and freezes there
3. Reboot again and comes up with atmospheric conditions are interfering
4. Ring Sky
5. Sky tell me to reboot decoder – despite having already done it. No change
6. They then say that perhaps the frequency the decoder is on is wrong and give me the code to change it. Do so but no fix.
7. They then say they will send a technician out
8. The next day they call to say that there have been several calls from our apartment block so probably a fault with our building aerial.
9. Local company checks it out, and finds the power supply to the aerial has died. replaces it.
10. Everyone else in building gets Sky back but me.
11. Am stuck between sky saying it was a building fault and the body corporate saying it has now been fixed. Now been four days with no TV or Sky. Try rebooting decoder several more times.
12. Finally decide will have to pay out of own pocket for a technician and ring one up. He confirms that there is no fault at the building end.
13. I prepare to ring Sky again, but luckily mention to him that their previous advice had been to change the frequency. He rants about how they are morons and they should never ever advice customers to do that – there is one setting for commercial premises and one for residential and should never swap them.
14. Luckily he knows the code to change the frequency (or whatever its technical name was) and yes hey presto after four days I have television again.

The moral of the story is the next time Sky stops working, do not ring Sky for help!

Both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are no longer available on Sky, on the NZ Comedy Central channel.

Aaaaarrrrgh.

I don’t know who made the decision, but I’d like to shoot them. Both those shows were on my daily record series.

If you want to help push for their return, you can join the Facebook Group asking for that.

And people wonder why people use bit torrent? I pay almost $100/month to Sky so I can legally view overseas content such as the Daily Show. Take away my only legal way of viewing it, and well what a great incentive you give me.

The Dom Post reports:

Sky Television chief executive John Fellet says he hopes Sky can persuade at least three or four internet providers not to charge customers to download programmes and movies from its soon-to-be-launched internet television service, iSky.

If Sky makes the material available on servers which are open for peering, then that should allow NZ ISPs to exempt them from data caps.

Mr Fellet revealed a few more details of the service, which he said would launch in mid-November and would be free to Sky customers who had signed up to the equivalent pay-TV channels.

Sky will stream three sports channels and a selection of news channels. Subscribers will also be able to download 200 movies to watch at any time from a catalogue that will change each month, and catch up on movies and many programmes they may have missed on Prime and other “basic” Sky channels.

Great, I look forward to this.

One industry source said iSky put internet providers in a quandary. Sky was being “hard-nosed” and there was little in it collectively for internet providers to offer iSky unmetered, though some ISPs might steal a march on rivals by doing so, given Sky’s hold over key broadcast content.

Vodafone and Orcon are among those believed to be considering letting customers access iSky without that contributing to their monthly broadband data caps. Orcon spokesman Duncan Blair confirmed it was in discussions.

Vodafone doing so, would help keep me as a customer. Their e-mail quality has been crap lately, so we need some sweeteners!

Sky has this time spent about $4m so it can host the content on its own computers in New Zealand. That means internet providers will not need to pay for capacity on the Southern Cross cable to serve up programmes to customers, making the option of unmetered downloads more viable.

Mr Fellet said that, initially, Sky would only directly profit from iSky by also serving up pay-per-view movies for viewing on computers. It would not sell its “adult” pay-per-view programmes online, at least at first, he said. That business was “slowly dying anyway” as a result of the preponderance of free pornography on the internet.

No wonder the Ministerial credit card expenses have been dropping

I was a big champion of how TVNZ should make their free to air channels viewable on Sky boxes. It took a while, but you can now get TVNZ6 and 7 on Sky, which is great.

Sadly Sky do not seem to be reciprocating in the spirit of open access to the episode programme guide for their own channels.

Over at Geekzone Reven explains:

i just receieved a take down order from sky.

was wondering if anyone has any legal expertise?

not sure how much of a case they have, since
- i dont host any epg data
- sky isnt even used as a source for xmltvnz

What this is about is the application designed by Reven reads programme guide data from TV websites, so that users of home theatre PC’s can have an electronic tv guides built in to their systems.

If people want to use their own PCs as an electronic TV guide they should be able to.

In the US and Australia, courts have ruled EPG data is in the public domain. But the small guy probably can’t afford a lawsuit from Sky.

Sky produce a great product in My Sky, and great channels. But if someone wishes to subscribe to their channels, but use their own electronic EPG, they should be able to.

The Herald reports:

Pay television giant Sky is planning to hit the pause button on its Sky Online site, saying the service does not make sense in the current New Zealand broadband market.

Fellet said: “We did this to make subscribers feel better about our service but it has not been a great viewer experience.”

Viewers were using up their broadband capacity and then becoming unhappy with Sky when they passed data limits and their internet service provider (ISP) dropped them back to dial-up speeds.

I agree such a service will be greatly limited by data caps. But assuming Sky hosts its content locally, and hosts it in a site that peers with the major ISPs, I would have hoped that such local traffic could be excluded from data caps. It is the international bandwidth that is the big problem.

TVNZ was the first broadcaster in Australasia to launch a full online catch-up service and nearly all of of its prime-time shows are available through this service. Each week nearly 250,000 New Zealanders stream 1.5 million shows to their homes, Paris says.

Some TVNZ traffic has been through a relationship with the state-owned ISP Orcon, which has allowed its subscribers to access the TVNZ ondemand website without affecting data caps.

Orcon executive Scott Bartlett said data caps remained an impediment partly because there was only one “pipeline” from New Zealand allowing internet traffic from the United States – the source of a lot of internet traffic.

He said there were also issues over Telecom charges for data transfers.

This is why peering locally is so important. People should be able to download locally without it affecting their data cap.

I am loving having Comedy Central now available on Sky. Colbert Report, Southpark etc etc.

Best of all it is part of the overall Sky package so no extra charge.

Now all Sky has to do is get the SciFi Channel here. Heaps of people would pay for it.

Yay yay yay. I have heard a reliable rumour that later today it will be announced that TVNZ6 and 7 will be made available on Sky.

This is excellent news as it means Sky users (especially those who use My Sky) can get all NZ free to air channels through the one device.

The taxpayer directly funds TVNZ around $80 million for these channels. I objected to having to buy a second decoder to get them, when I already had aperfectly good digital decoder. But it wasn’t so much the cost – it is about being user friendly.

Users wants all their free to air channels (and any others they pay for) on the one device. I want to see all programmes on at say 7 pm on the one listing.

Not sure if any money has changed hands to facilitate this. Hopefully Sky is also making Prime available on Freeview as quid pro quo.

I have never watched an episode of Media 7 because it is not on Sky, and I really want to. Likewise never watched Backbenches except if there in person. This deal should see viewership increase significantly for both prigrammes.

Very pleased to see:

Broadcasting Minister Jonathan Coleman would like to see the Freeview channels TVNZ 6 and TVNZ 7 broadcast on Sky Television in the next couple of years.

Same. I am helping pay $78 million to TVNZ for those channels, and I ant to be able to watch them on my My Sky box. I do not want to have to buy a Freeview box also. It’s party a point of principle over the cost, but more a matter of convenience – I want one box which records the programmes I want.  When looking at what is on in an evening, you don’t want to have to check two seperate sets of listings.

Mediawatch on Sunday did a spell talking about blogs and included a chat with me, and an extract from the Two Helens ad Whale Oil and I did.

Last week I did an extended interview for around 10 minutes with Eric Young on Sky News. Was lots of fun. The dog toys even made an appearance. Also I discovered that Eric wears jeans with his suit and hides it from the camera

And Ali Ikram had some fun on Sunrise last week with our the two Helens ad.

I’m also on One’s Breakfast around 8.20 tomorrow discussing the campaign and the election.

To go along with the new hi def 42″ flat screen, I figured I should invest in upgrading the My Sky box to My Sky HDi. It was a good investment, as Pat Pilcher states in the Herald.

New features include:

• Movies, Sports and TV3 in high def
• Dolby Digital Audio
• HD doubled to 320 GB
• Four tuners, allowing three to be used for recording and viewing, and the fourth for the programme guide
• An Ethernet port, allowing downloading from the Internet at some future stage
• A USB port, which may allow you to add on additional storage one day

Pilcher’s recommendation:

MySKy HDi is more of an evolutionary improvement than just an upgrade to its non-HDMI sibling. HD video, proper surround audio and what appears to be some serious future-proofing makes buying MySky HDi a definite no-brainer.

I agree.

Last week I set up an online survey for MPs, asking them to rate various media organisations and senior gallery journalists on a scale of 0 to 10. Just under one quarter of MPs responded, and the results are shown below.

As the media often rate how well MPs are doing, I thought it appropriate to reverse this and ask the questions in reverse. The media are a hugely powerful filter, and it is appropriate (in my opinion) to have some focus on how well they are perceived to be performing.

The questions were:

1. For each media organisation please give them a rating from 0 to 10 for how well you think they do in their parliamentary reporting. This should take account of all relevant factors – accuracy, fairness, thoroughness, relevance, substance etc.
2. Now for some individual senior members of the press gallery, please rate from 0 to 10 how well you think they perform at proving fair, accurate, unbiased and informative reporting on Parliament. You can skip any that you do not feel able to rate.
3. Finally can you indicate your party grouping as National, Labour or Other. Your individual identity is not sought by us, and we have no way or interest in identifying individual respondents. However we would like to summarise results for all MPs and by the three groupings to see if they vary by party grouping.

It is important that these be read in context, so make the following points:

1. This is the opinion of MPs only. It does not set out to be an objective rating, and should not be seen as such.
2. MPs get reported on by the gallery. While this makes them the group of NZers potentially best able to have an informed opinion on the media (which is why I surveyed them), it also gives them a conflict of interest. MPs may score journalists lowly due to personal run ins with them, or the fact they are too good at their job! This should be borne in mind.
3. I only e-mailed the survey to the 121 MPs, but it is possible that one or more responses was filled in by a staff member who has access to the MPs mailbox. I think this is unlikely, as most staff are very professional. However MPs were not required to prove their identity to vote, as confidentiality of individual responses was important. You need to know the Survey URL to be able to vote.
4. National MPs made up 43% of responses, slightly above their numbers in Parliament. Minor Party MPs were also slightly over-represented, Labour MPs under-represented and some MPs did not give a party identification.

NZ Press Association tops the rankings with a mean or average 6.1 rating – and received no very low ratings from anyone. The two Internet agencies were in the top five, indicating MPs like the fact their releases are carried in full. Trans-Tasman also does well.

Television generally gets ranked lowly with all four stations in the bottom half. Sky News actually ranks highest.

Radio is middle of the field with NewstalkZB being the highest ranked radio broadcaster.

The newspapers range the spectrum. The NZ Herald is up at 5.3, Press at 4.2 and Dom Post at 4.1. I would have them all higher, but this is a survey of MPs, not of my views.

Now the sample sizes are of course very small (but of a limited population) but let us look at how National MPs ranked media compared to all the other MPs:

National MPs ranked the four TV channels much higher than other MPs did. Maybe this is minor parties upset that they do not get on TV much?

Despite the generally accepted lean to the left of Radio NZ, National MPs ranked Radio NZ higher than other MPs did. And while some on the left attack the NZ Herald at favouring National, National MPs actually ranked them lower than other MPs did. The Listener and NBR also get accused of leaning right, but again get ranked lower by National MPs.

The Nat MPs also rated the online media very lowly.

Now the journalists. I decided not to list all members of the press gallery, but only those who are relatively senior, and are more likely to have a reasonable number of MPs have formed opinions about them. Looking back I could have included more.

If any journalist is unhappy about being missed out, happy to include you next year. Now again it is worth remembering these are only the opinions of those MPs who responded to my survey – it is not an objective rating.

John Armstrong tops the ratings, followed by the NZPA Political Editor Peter Wilson. Generally MPs ranked journalists slightly higher than media organisations. As can be seen by the minimum ratings showing, some MPs were very harsh handing out zeroes. Did WInston multiple vote? (Note I have no idea if Winston did vote)

And once again we compare responses between National MPs and other MPs.

Again very interesting. The SST is generally seen as hostile to National, but Ruth Laugeson is ranked much higher by National MPs, than by other MPs. Likewise the Gordon Campbell and Brent Edwards (both left leaning) are ranked higher by National MPs than other MPs.

Also for some reasons National MPs ranked Ian Templeton very lowly. Maybe they don’t like his weekly chats with Clark and Key, ignoring the lesser MPs?

Yay Canwest is negotiating to have high definition TV3 available on Sky.

The Government and TVNZ is trying to force everyone to have two set boxes – MySky and Freeview. The problem is they have an inferior product in Freeview.

It is not just about the cost, even though it rankles I am paying through my taxes for two TVNZ channels that the Government refuses to allow me to access without an unnecessary purchase.

But the big issue if convenience. I don’t want to have to flip between two boxes to see what is on TV. I don’t want some shows recorded on one box, and some on another. I want to be able to, in fact, just get one listing of upcoming shows and decide which ones to record.

Sky TV is launching a service next month to allow people to download movies showing on Sky, off the Internet. It will only cost $5 a month. Sounds useful to me, even though at this stage will not include the very latest movies.

Mauricio Freitas blogged yesterday that there is an online petition asking Sky (or TVNZ or TV3) to bring in the Sci-Fi channel.

I am signature No 541.