Posts by Russell Brown
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Good interview with Paul Brislen this morning on TVNZ Business. I quite like the way he suggests that if the minister won’t listen to his industry, they’ll just have to arrange a meeting with Prime Minister.
I do wonder if Joyce’s dictatorial style is going to come back and bite him at some point.
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And when it comes to two dollar shop kitsch, Ngati Whatua is going to have to epically pimp out that plastic waka to out-tack this load of old balls the Auckland City Council will hold a publicly-subsidised tea-bagging with.
No need to knock the ball. It’s something of a technical marvel, and it has been installed by Tourism NZ in various world cities as part of a four-year tourism and trade campaign that was always intended to culminate with the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. As such, it’s a rare and rather blessed example of a long-term strategy.
And it’s not the taxpayer stumping up $100,000 for the choral project – it’s the Lotteries fund, which invited applications last year. The waka, on the other hand, seems to be the product of a less co-ordinated, and certainly less transparent, process:
An Auckland Council spokesman, who did not want to be named, said the council had been approached by Dr Sharples’ office to take ownership of the waka. The minister’s office wanted an immediate decision but was told the matter would have to go through an approval process. The council heard no more after that.
It sounds a bit of a mess, in keeping with the recent history of of the Queen’s Wharf site.
Disclosure: I’m pleased to be able to say (ie: hadn’t realised it had been officially announced) that NZ On Screen applied and was granted the equal biggest Lotteries grant ($400,000) for this installation project, which will appear around the country:
New Zealand On Screen is an unparalleled showcase of Aotearoa identity as seen on screen. From Billy T to Boy, from Gloss to Goodbye Pork Pie, from Peter Snell to The Piano, Hillary to Hudson and Halls, New Zealand On Screen celebrates screen icons that embody Kiwi spirit and stories.
With eye-catching installations New Zealand On Screen will celebrate, move and inspire New Zealanders. For visitors it will be a stirring affirmation of the best of Aotearoa in 2011.The installation is composed of three zones: an identity gateway giving a stirring introduction to the rich diversity of our national screen culture; an interactive area made up of a series of kiosks and a state-of-the-art video feature wall. Here, visitors will be able to celebrate local communities and locations through their screen stories; A ‘wish you were here’ e-postcard space where visitors can have their image inserted into their choice of classic New Zealand film scenes. They can then print off a copy or email it to friends and family. Visitors will be left with a rich understanding of what it means to come ‘from here’.
The full list is here as (why? why?) a Word document. It’s quite an amazing array of projects, with lots of smaller grants, many local Maori projects, etc.
I’m not not up in arms about the waka plan, but it does seem poorly executed in comparison to the other projects you’ve criticised.
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Cracker: Send in the Clowns, in reply to Ken Sparks,
I remember working out there as a casual stagehand 30 odd years ago – helping to put up the ‘Close to Home’ set in that state of the art studio.
RIP Avalon…OMG! Were you there for the infamous "domino" set collapse?
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Sacha,
TBH, I was prepared to accept a case that the risk of Mediaworks' failure was such as to justify financing. I'd set the bar pretty low on that, not being a fan of disaster capitalism.
But the things that Idiot/Savant has found are shaping up as a significant story.
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TVNZ 7 is without a doubt less popular than those other channels. It has almost zero promotion and a budget to match. It doesn’t appear in listings in newspapers or The Listener.
And what a clusterfuck that's been.
Basically, TVNZ and APN have been unable to reach an agreement on forward listings for 6 and 7. TVNZ makes money selling forward listings to APN, for use in The Listener and the HoS -- they're copyright goods, in TVNZ's view.
I've been told that TVNZ wanted to either charge either more or the same for the service with the TVNZ 7 listings included, and APN firmly wanted to pay less because of the extra space the listings would occupy.
I'm genuinely not sure where the balance of fault lies, but the failure of these two companies to reach an agreement in the public interest has been unedifying.
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Cracker: Send in the Clowns, in reply to George Darroch,
There are still a great deal of households that do not get digital television. This is one.
Quite independent of mine and Damian's interests, it's worthwhile if you can afford a -sub$200 decoder or a $450+ Freeview-integrated TV. The improvement in picture quality, even on a CRT TV, is remarkable.
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suffice to say I know of no current TVNZ 7 show (and I know the approximate budgets of several) receiving more than the $27k per episode received by The Nation, and I know some that get less than half that, even though you wouldn’t know it to look at the production values of The Nation.
Burn!
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Juha Saarinen,
PON is harder to unbundle than active fibre-optics.
So I am (now) told.
Because individual fibre does not go back the the exchange,
there is no way for anyone else to physically access it, only at the Ethernet layer. So no wholesale competition no wholesale price competition, no technological competition. Just retailing.And you know that gigabit fibre Maurice Williamson was telling us about before the election? Yeah, nah. We're not building that kind of network now.
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Can you spot the issue here? You can’t compare daily and weekly viewship, because obviously these aren’t unique viewers. ONE News doesn’t have 600,000 people watching one night, then 600,000 completely new people the next. It’s viewership isn’t 4.2m people per week. It’s probably more like 2m. But the point of the Herald editorial seems to be simply to pick one high figure (and ONE News is obviously one of the highest you can pick, twice that of 3 News) and compare it with a relatively low one (although 200,000 people? I’m stoked).
Thanks for this Damian. I'd been meaning to address that crappy little drive-by of an editorial (which appears to be addressed towards something that a Herald reporter quoted me saying).
I know that statistical illiteracy and the Herald aren't exactly strangers, but it wasn't like the author even wanted to know the difference between nightly ratings and weekly cume. A measured assessment wasn't really the aim of that editorial.
I am of course simply falling into the trap –that unless TVNZ 7 shows can somehow prove themselves as popular as commercial shows, they shouldn’t exist. Which kinda defeats the purpose of public service broadcasting.
Exactly. The editorial seemed at pains to assess the channel on the opposite terms to its actual mandate. If all you wanted was numbers, you wouldn't be re-screening Attitude at decent times three times a week. Eeew! Cripples speaking for themselves in prime-time! Commercial suicide! But that's actually what TVNZ 7 is there for.
Also, thanks for reading Whaleoil so I don't have to. Although I do feel bound to note that Mr Oil's revulsion for taxpayer largesse was not such as to prevent him agreeing to wax on about his reading habits on TVNZ 7's The Good Word.
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I got this from a reader who works for a large telco and is familiar with the work of the industry working parties relating to ultra-fast broadband, but would rather not be named:
You ask why Mr Joyce believes a holiday to be necessary. I believe this to be simple really – it’s all about uptake. Crown Fibre Holdings are terrified about uptake – or lack thereof – for two reasons.
1. Reduced uptake lengthens the “earn out” provision in the PPP deal and increases the CFH risk and exposure.
2. An absence of willing partners. As others in the thread have pointed out, the investment looks dicey without a guaranteed market. Market share is hard to guarantee. So is margin – if the Comcom is allowed to intervene. The Comcom is easier to control than the market is.
2.1. If Telecom were to win, an incentive needs to be provided to force a migration from copper to fibre. What better incentive than to remove oversight?
2.1.1. If Telecom doesn’t win, the UFB will compete with cheaper copper. Which might harm uptake. Some of your posters have assumed that they will have the choice of remaining on cheaper copper – I’m not so sure. Also, the bill would relax UCLL and Wholesale regulation.
It has taken the media quite a while to realise there is something afoot here. The issues with the UFB and CFH are more than skin deep, and the problems are not restricted to regulation – ever asked yourself why a local fibre might prefer a technology such as passive optical network to an active fibre architecture? From day 0 they are being allowed to climb the “value chain”. It’s not the “Telcos” (well in the traditional sense anyhow) that you should be worrying about. Everyone thinks they will be getting fibre, when the truth is something quite different…
I follow this apart from the PON part – I can understand why a local fibre company would prefer a passive network – way cheaper to build, just much harder to scale – but not how that lets the LFC “climb the value chain”.