Maori TV needs legislation and transmission platform

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Maori Television Service needs legislation to be passed and its transmission platform finalised before the channel can get up and running, chairman Derek Fox says.

The Maori channel had been expected to start operating in July this year but Mr Fox said it was still at least three months away.

MTS had a programming schedule, staff, premises it wanted to lease in Auckland, and design work ready for setting up the offices.

Mr Fox today told the Maori affairs select committee that there were two outstanding issues to be resolved.

Legislation making the channel a legal entity had yet to be passed, and Mr Fox hoped this could happen by the end of this year.

He also said decisions had to be made by the Government over the channel's transmission platform.

"It's no secret that our preferred option is TV4."

Mr Fox said this would mean the Maori channel could broadcast to the bulk of the population although it would still need other means to reach areas not covered by TV4.

He hoped those decisions would be finalised in the "next few weeks".

Mr Fox said CanWest had put conditions on MTS getting the TV4 signal "but CanWest has come back in the last 10 days or a fortnight to say 'let's talk again' so we're proceeding on those lines".

The Government has previously told MTS it would prefer that the channel broadcast on an existing UHF frequency.

However, Mr Fox said it would cost Maori -- probably the people least able to afford it -- $350 to buy a UHF aerial and about another $100 to tune their television sets to find the channel.

Mr Fox accused the Ministry for Economic Development and BCL, the broadcasting arm of TVNZ, of telling "a few porkies" about UHF.

"To say that they can put up the same number of UHF transmitters to give the same coverage as the TV4 VHF transmitters is incorrect."

UHF was "a very fickle signal" that was dependent on line of sight and other things.

The committee was also told the Government had allocated $6 million to getting the channel established and it would ultimately get $55m a year in operating costs.

Mr Fox said the board had not asked for more money but "we might".

MTS had commissioned about 600 hours of Maori programming, of which 85 per cent was in the Maori language, 10 per cent bilingual and 5 per cent in English, he said.

Officials had budgeted the channel to produce one hour of television each day for the first year, increasing to three hours a day after that.

"I'm not sure what Einstein thought that up but the reality is I don't think the Maori people have come all this way to turn the TV set on for an hour a day.

"So we have worked to develop a very broad programme spectrum to allow us somewhere between eight and 12 hours a day. That's very ambitious."

It had capped costs for programmes it commissioned at $40,000 an hour.

- NZPA