15 September 2008

HDTV in Canberra

15 September 2008 | Holden Caulfield

Having recently availed myself with a new HD television I am generally enjoying the experience.

However, can anyone tell me why Southern Cross (10) and WIN (9) do not provide a complete HD station? They only broadcast a few slim offerings in to Canberra, with a loop of generic scenery/images filling in the rather large gaps between HD programming.

The other capitals around Australia seem to get a much better deal in this regard. Prime looks to be the only commercial offering in Canberra to provide a complete HD option (well, limited as they are by Channel 7’s excellent level of mediocrity).

Why is this so? And when will Canberra’s HDTV options improve to match our bigger city cousins?

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Holden Caulfield10:24 pm 15 Sep 08

I agree BD, but live F1 would be nice. If only it was on Foxtel, haha!

BigDave10:02 pm 15 Sep 08

I was wondering what the deal was with the HD channels too. In the end I decided it wasn’t worth worrying about as I only really watch Fox. Can’t face sitting through utter shite made for numbskulls such as Big Brother, Australian Idiot, Rove or that bloody dancing crap with the “celebrities” in it, interlaced with 1000 advert breaks making a 30 minute show into 3 hours…

heinous7:21 pm 15 Sep 08

Now Packer’s gone, why don’t we ditch his plan to block the use of all of the new bandwidth made available by the advent of digital television with pointless multiple simultaneous transmissions of the same signal. All that his greed has achieved is to push people away from yesterday’s model of a single channel information source to the Internet where there is no restriction on the sharing of information. When will the television broadcasters realise that the only way for them to survive is to compete by providing multi-channel content rather than attempting to force us to live with yesterdays model.

Gungahlin Al6:36 pm 15 Sep 08

Yes you’d think that with all the competition, the free to air TV stations would be bending over backwards to endear themselves to viewers, rather than engineering newer and better ways to piss off their viewers and drive them to other viewing sources.

Bit like when CT was putting out a crappy website because they were a “newspaper”. (Good thing for RA I guess!) Now they are starting to engage the community through an improving website.

You can’t swim against a riptide or you just get dead.

aronde6:02 pm 15 Sep 08

Gungahlin Al said :

It was just SBS and ABC2 that were hopeless with the EPG but I’ve noticed a couple of others are crook now too.

Sounds typical! Yes the PVR feature was handy but 95% of my recordings are kids shows now that the 5 year old has figured out how to record playschool! Personally the internet supplies 99% of our viewing pleasure because of (a) the ridiculous start and end times (never as advertised) (b) sick of starting to watch a show only to have it mysteriously stop mid series or switched to 11pm on a random night of the week and (c) the ridiculous amount of time it takes for aussie TV to actually screen shows from overseas and then they just do (b) to annoy everyone some more.

futto5:46 pm 15 Sep 08

The Today show in the morning is great in HD. When the ads come on, they flick back to the soothing test pattern of spotted cuscuses and such. No Ad’s…its great!

Gungahlin Al5:31 pm 15 Sep 08

Not just you aronde. It was just SBS and ABC2 that were hopeless with the EPG but I’ve noticed a couple of others are crook now too.
Because of course EPG makes it easy to program your PVR to record shows after which you can rip through the ads. Harder to program = less likely to record.
Same as the way they’ve stuffed G-Code by farting around with start and end times…

aronde5:21 pm 15 Sep 08

Slightly off topic but my set top box has stopped displaying the names of the shows when I flick the channels (says ‘no info available’). Is this something wrong with my box or did the TV channels stop transmitting that information for everyone?

Holden Caulfield5:13 pm 15 Sep 08

@Angry, yes they do. I’ve heard in the past it has something to do with our Mickey Mouse aggregate channels, (Prime, WIN, Capital) as opposed to the “proper” channels (7, 9, 10).

Foxtel iQ would be great if we got the FTA channels thru Foxtel here. Alas we have to make do with more roundabouts and stuff all traffic issues instead.

AngryHenry4:59 pm 15 Sep 08

Holden Caulfield said :

While we’re at it … how come we only get SBS and ABC (Sydney/NSW) on Foxtel in Canberra, when most other cities get all the FTA channels?

Do they really??? Christ I hate Foxtel!!!

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