Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Sub Mission, in reply to Deborah,
So… ummm… there are quite a few typos in this, which I’m guessing is deliberate?
No. I came in from doing the satellite interview and had to write it very quickly to I could do a radio interview. Just had another editing pass on it. But yeah, it is hard to proof one's own copy.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Tom Beard,
You follow Neitzsche's comparison of a marriage to a conversation, then state that any conversation with more than two people must have "less depth". Boy, you must be a riot at dinner parties.
Tom, I, too, have feelings for your post.
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Hard News: Friday Music: This stuff works, in reply to Hebe,
Tech question: how can I watch that Reggae Britannia without chomping the broadband allowance?
Get a new ISP? Snap Internet recently upgraded our 105GB cap to 550GB a month. It's basically the same as having no cap.
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Hard News: Friday Music: This stuff works, in reply to Peter Darlington,
Now, don’t be hating on the Tate Modern, it’s a great place. Just the Turbine Room alone is pretty awe inspiring.
Yeah, but I felt a bit colonised by much of the art.
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Christ! It keeps coming!
Opossom, the well groovy little combo formed by former Mint Chick Kody Nielsen and Bic Runga, has its debut album out on iTunes today.
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Hard News: Friday Music: This stuff works, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
One assumes the voting is limited to one vote per user per song, and that users are tracked by email address or IP address so one person can't create multiple accounts to get extra votes.
Creating mutiple accounts would be a bit of a pain, though. Probably easier to get your mum to vote for you.
Still, good on 'em, a nice initiative, put all the released and unreleased artists in a big box and let them 'juke' it out...
Boom! Good to see you're on form today Ian.
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I’ve asked The Audience for clarification on the rule quoted in the Herald story that “only unreleased songs are open to public voting and grants”.
The definition of “released” seems a bit tricky. Do artists have to keep everything off Bandcamp? What about Soundcloud?
Update: “Bandcamp’s ok. Commercially released tracks (iTunes & retail shops) aren’t eligible, or tracks that’ve already had funding.”
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Hard News: Reading the Numbers, in reply to Steve Barnes,
A dish plus installation costs plus the decoder (TVs don't come with satellite decoders, terrestrial only) looks expensive compared to signing up, so Sky win by default and if you can't afford Sky you may well have to go without.
Best way of doing it is to get an installation deal with Sky on the shortest possible contract, then drop Sky and get a $50 Freeview satellite decoder.
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Hard News: Reading the Numbers, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Or Dr Thompson's idea of levying SKY and the Internet providers
Bloody Steven Joyce always quotes the Labour government's statement that TVNZ 7 was expected to be self-sustaining after five years, but never the basis for that statement at the time it was made.
The original business plan was based on a must-offer-must-pay regulated regime. So the two channels would be available to pay providers -- but at a regulated price. Along with some programme sponsorship, that would have done the trick.
But when National came in, the minister first leaned on TVNZ to make the digital channels available free to Sky, and then on the Kordia SOE to cut a sweet deal for Prime to get Freeview transmission. Sigh.
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Hard News: Reading the Numbers, in reply to Myles Thomas,
In the 90 seconds I had to explain the issue between intensive advertising, I was asked why TVNZ 7 is important to which I said it doesn’t have ads so it doesn’t need to simplify subjects down to a soundbite.
This is true. We can talk for 20 minutes without interruption if we need to. That's for ever.
Answer to the question: what are we getting on TVNZ 7 that we can get elsewhere?
When we totted it up recently, there were 15 documentaries on free-to-air TV in one week. 10 of them were on TVNZ 7.