Beijing may be last free-to-air Olympics: TVNZ

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manhinli

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#161311 1-Sep-2008 16:16

martin308: Sounds good to me TVNZ's coverage was a shambles, crappy/plain wrong programming information and not showing NZ athletes compete live is useless

You do realise that most of the coverage was not shot by their own cameras - they use feeds from others, which of course will never provide the best NZ coverage.

I would probably expect the same from SKY (using feeds from others), as setting up that much equipment just doesn't seem viable for most broadcasters here in New Zealand.

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martin308

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#161312 1-Sep-2008 16:19

Thats fine I didnt expect them to shoot the actual footage, what I did expect was that the programming information on their website was remotely accurate and that when a NZ'er was competing they show them (or at least have in their "accurate" programming guide when they are going to show them). I dont think that is too much to ask, is it?

rphenix

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#161620 2-Sep-2008 16:59

sbiddle: The reality however is that I no longer consider Prime TV to be a Free To Air TV Channel. Freeview is the replacement for our analogue TV beroadcasts and Prime is not available on the Freeview Platform.

Exactly :)

digitalepsilon

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#161637 2-Sep-2008 17:46

As much as I'd like the games to remain free-to-air, Sky's plans for coverage do look impressive with plans for no less than six channels (vs TVNZ's four this year) covering the Winter Games in 2010 and Summer Games in 2012. That's 4 years away though, but if they keep to that and do offer that many channels, there can't be too many events that won't get some airtime, especially in events where there aren't any NZ competitors which I have to admit are some of the more interesting sports.

digitalepsilon

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#161646 2-Sep-2008 18:10

martin308: Thats fine I didnt expect them to shoot the actual footage, what I did expect was that the programming information on their website was remotely accurate and that when a NZ'er was competing they show them (or at least have in their "accurate" programming guide when they are going to show them). I dont think that is too much to ask, is it?

That's true but to be fair some of the events did run behind schedule (I think the cycling was over 20 minutes late). That sort of thing was out of TVNZ's control and I didn't expect them to update the TV schedule with up-to-the-minute info when events did run late. Sometimes those late events put the whole schedule for the night out. Also the coverage schedule might also change depending on the results of heats or surprise upsets which could change which events got airtime, and so on. I'm not sure if a solid TV schedule would ever be forthcoming for Olympic games. A tentative one is probably about the best you'd get I think.

The most accurate channels I found for live coverage (on schedule) was TVNZ3 and TVNZ4 which were only available on the website (not Freeview). From what I could see those two channels were sourced direct from the host broadcaster and had uninterrupted live coverage for many events that you could watch sometimes hours before any coverage appeared on the main channel TVNZ1.

old3eyes

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#161658 2-Sep-2008 19:04

digitalepsilon:
As much as I'd like the games to remain free-to-air, Sky's plans for coverage do look impressive with plans for no less than six channels (vs TVNZ's four this year) covering the Winter Games in 2010 and Summer Games in 2012. That's 4 years away though, but if they keep to that and do offer that many channels, there can't be too many events that won't get some airtime, especially in events where there aren't any NZ competitors which I have to admit are some of the more interesting sports.

The only problem with live coverage of 2012 is it's in London so for most people the only live events they will see will at breakfast before work, the evening stuff will be canned..

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sbiddle

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#161661 2-Sep-2008 19:10

digitalepsilon:
As much as I'd like the games to remain free-to-air, Sky's plans for coverage do look impressive with plans for no less than six channels (vs TVNZ's four this year) covering the Winter Games in 2010 and Summer Games in 2012. That's 4 years away though, but if they keep to that and do offer that many channels, there can't be too many events that won't get some airtime, especially in events where there aren't any NZ competitors which I have to admit are some of the more interesting sports.

IMHO TVNZ's coverage could have been far better - it would be interesting to know how much it would have cost them to temporarily run 2 additional channels on the Kordia mux to deliver 4 TV channels. This would have been brilliant.

I remember watching the 2002 Commonwealth Games on Multichoice while I was in South Africa and they had (from memory) around 6 channels dedicated to it with a combination of live and prerecorded and 1 channel simply playing looped highlights packages.

bobmeister

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#161675 2-Sep-2008 20:02

I thought TVNZs coverage of the games was appalling. They had a whole lot of channels available on Freeview that they could have used during the games. Its not as if TV6 and 7 have huge followings, so it would not have hurt to show some sports LIVE simultaneously.

They hacked it around, showed endless games of beach volley ball when sports like sailing were going on LIVE with kiwis involved.

At least Sky understand sport and will show multiple channels all the time.

Lets face it, if you want good sport on TV, pay for it. Leave TVNZ to reality TV.

digitalepsilon

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#161681 2-Sep-2008 20:22

To correct what sky said earlier in the year, when they held the launch for their HD service in June, they said there will actually be a total of 8 dedicated channels. Russell Brown blogged about it here.

Russell Brown: He also outlined Sky's plans for the 2010 Winter Olympics and 2012 Olympics in London. They're huge. Sky will have eight dedicated Olympic channels, plus 12 hours a day "free to air" on Prime. There will be online and mobile content too. He quoted a total of 3638 hours coverage of the London games, contrasting that with the 810 hours TVNZ provides from Beijing.

In comparison, NBC touted a figure of 3600 hours for this year's coverage for US viewers. Whether those were 3600 hours of original coverage or included replays and highlights I'm not sure, but Sky's numbers are obviously a vast increase over what was seen this year.

One of the blog comments suggested that in making a deal with the IOC to be the NZ broadcaster, Sky had to promise a degree of free-to-air coverage (12 hours). If that's true, I would think Prime would have to go onto Freeview at some point to realistically keep that promise? I can't find any info on whether talk of such a promise to the IOC is true though.

martin308

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#161794 3-Sep-2008 11:12

digitalepsilon:
martin308: Thats fine I didnt expect them to shoot the actual footage, what I did expect was that the programming information on their website was remotely accurate and that when a NZ'er was competing they show them (or at least have in their "accurate" programming guide when they are going to show them). I dont think that is too much to ask, is it?

That's true but to be fair some of the events did run behind schedule (I think the cycling was over 20 minutes late). That sort of thing was out of TVNZ's control and I didn't expect them to update the TV schedule with up-to-the-minute info when events did run late. Sometimes those late events put the whole schedule for the night out. Also the coverage schedule might also change depending on the results of heats or surprise upsets which could change which events got airtime, and so on. I'm not sure if a solid TV schedule would ever be forthcoming for Olympic games. A tentative one is probably about the best you'd get I think.

The most accurate channels I found for live coverage (on schedule) was TVNZ3 and TVNZ4 which were only available on the website (not Freeview). From what I could see those two channels were sourced direct from the host broadcaster and had uninterrupted live coverage for many events that you could watch sometimes hours before any coverage appeared on the main channel TVNZ1.

Im not even talking about events running behind schedule! A few examples of the cock ups I experienced with their coverage:

1) They had the taekwondo on the last saturday and their programming guide listed it as having the first half on tvnz3 and then the second half on tvnz1, so I set this up to record it. Turns out that they just played the whole thing on tvnz3 without any info being given out hence I missed the whole second half of it...

2) At one point there was a NZ taekwondo athlete competing, the event they were going to show on tvnz1 was cancelled due to rain so instead of showing the NZ'er they showed a repeat of one of the previous days events in which no NZ'ers were competing in on 2 channels simultaneously

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