I just got a letter from SKY saying that on July 25 at 2 am most channels will go offline for at least an hour as SKY will be activating their new satellite. Not sure what this involves but I smell HDTV....
The new satellite will not go up till september as the above link states, so dont get excited. Interestingly TVNZ have sent out a memo to the FTA community indicated that they will be making changes to their transponders on B1 at the same time. This will effect viewers of TV1/2 on Sky below Taupo. But for what it is worth it is just a reconfig of pids in the stream. TVNZ state that it is the first of a series of changes they are making on the road down to Freeview launch.
I dont know exactly what Sky will be doing, but it is most likely just standard gear upgrade or testing. As for TVNZ I guess the pid restructure will just be to make things for logical for their final setup, they are also shutting down the 12.456GHz transponder and moving all their services to the 12.483GHz transponder some days latter, I presume 12.456 will become the half for CanWest and other non TVNZ users.
The letter I got said the outage was to relocate the uplink, and the satellite was being launched "in late 2006". It listed 11 channels that would be affected, only one of which I ever watch.
As for the reason for the new satellite, I heard they sold the old one at auction - for something like $202 million?
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