By FIONA RAE
Digital television. It's okay. Don't be frightened. When TVNZ and Telstra Saturn launch their service in April or May next year it doesn't mean we'll all need fancy-pants TVs to receive those off-world signals.
As any sports bore with Sky Digital will tell you, your ordinary bog-standard telly gets digital right now — a flash TV just gives you a better picture. The new deal is like anything else these days: you pays your money, you takes your choice.
But TVNZ is in a unique position compared to Sky: it has the ability to make programmes. It's been doing it for years. Admittedly, it makes fewer of those it screens itself these days, preferring to pay independent com-panies instead, but there's no shortage of skills.
There is, according to reports, space for up to 16 channels available on the satellite transponder that TVNZ has bought rights to. At first, the service will be strictly television content, with relatively cheap hook-ups — probably around $200.
Think of what's possible for this brave new
television future: TVNZ holds television taonga in the form of archives. There could be a kind of "Kiwi Gold" channel. Perhaps they could show all those old documentaries and we could sigh and mutter about how they don't make them like they used to.
There's also the BBC and TVNZ's own newsroom, which is already producing news from early in the morning until late at night. It would be possible to gear up for a 24-hour service. Then there's regional TV, a channel for Maori and even public access television.
But how will I cope? you might be thinking. Our lives seem to be more complex than ever: the market researchers apparently no longer consider consumers to be an amorphous mass. Yes, we are individuals.
Well, the latest revolution in consumer electronics to help us independently minded individuals to cut our viewing cloth according to our needs is the Personal Video Recorder.
Here's a good party trick when next you're in a room full of advertising agency types: sidle up behind a group of them and whisper "TiVo," then step back and watch them blanch and clutch their chardonnays just a little harder.
PVRs, as they're known in the United States and Britain, don't actually cut out the ads for you, but they do fast-forward through them ultra-fast, hence the advertising industry's nervousness. A PVR is another box to stack on your entertainment unit that is basically a sophisticated video recorder.
It has a hard-drive instead of tape and is smart enough to record programmes according to your viewing habits, or by genre. It can also pause live programmes and you can return to them without missing anything. TiVo is the company that provides this service in the US and Britain.
There is a competitor in Britain that doesn't allow any hanky-panky with the ads. Instead, it collects information about your viewing habits, so that advertisers can target their market better.
That might sound a little creepy, but it may not be a bad thing.
That way, you might actually get ads for products you're genuinely interested in. It's already happening on the internet, where the kind of blanket advertising that we are subjected to on television is considered a scourge.
See, it's okay. The more complicated digital entertainment becomes, the more we'll be able to personalise our viewing choices. It'll be cool.
Now, how much is one of those fancy-pants TVs anyway?
<i>Powerpoint:</i> You pays your money . . .
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.