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Broadcasting the Future: Freeview
Digital broadcasting is opening up possibilities that ordinary New Zealanders could barely imagine a few years ago, and the future looks even brighter. Matthew Backhouse takes a look at what’s on the horizon with Freeview. “Incredible, isn’t it?” enthuses Steve Browning. He talks with passion about choice and possibility, and it’s easy to see why he’s so excited. As General Manager of Freeview, Browning stands at the forefront of New Zealand’s digital broadcasting revolution. Since its launch last year, Freeview has brought television well and truly into the 21st century. Over 150,000 New Zealanders now tune into the free-to-air digital service, and as exciting new technologies become available, Freeview’s appeal will continue to grow. Viewers will be able to watch high definition broadcasts from April, and digital video recorders will hit the market shortly afterwards. The way we access and engage with televised content is changing dramatically. But Freeview is not alone in the digital television market; Sky has offered a paid subscription service for a number of years. However, Steve Browning is quietly confident that Freeview has broad appeal, and according to the latest Nielsen Panorama survey, Freeview has started to chip away at Sky’s market. “The number of people who said they had given up their Sky subscriptions and now had Freeview was pretty high,” says Browning. At the end of October 2007 62,000 households have already embraced Freeview. “The number of Freeview boxes in homes has so far doubled our expectations,” says Browning. He attributes Freeview’s success to the quality of the service. “We went out with a very singular proposition, and that was solving bad reception.” But for Browning, Freeview is much more than a solution to poor television reception – it’s about offering choices. When the Freeview consortium’s four broadcasters first launched the service, viewers could tune into five pre-existing free-to-air TV channels and two radio stations. “Now we’ve got ten television channels,” says Browning. “It is offering more choice, and once people have seen the difference in quality they’re not going to go back.” But could too much choice be a bad thing? Currently, Freeview is broadcast via satellite; viewers need to install a satellite dish and a set-top receiver to tune in. Come April, Freeview will also be broadcast terrestrially via seventeen transmission towers across the country. Viewers will be able to tune into the terrestrial service using their existing UHF aerials, but there’s a catch – the terrestrial set-top receiver is likely to be the more expensive option. Weighing up the two alternatives can seem like a daunting task. “Right from the start we knew that if we went for the hybrid model, which is having both terrestrial and satellite, then that has the potential to create a little bit of confusion,” says Browning. “But the upside of that is choice. If you already have a dish on your house, the satellite option will be cheaper. If you don’t have a dish, the UHF terrestrial service could well be a better option.” Cost and convenience aren’t the only factors to consider, though. Only the terrestrial platform will offer high definition (HD) television. “The terrestrial platform is in that respect a premium service,” says Browning. Initially, only international content, like this year’s Beijing Olympics, will be broadcast in HD. Whether or not local content is produced in HD will be up to the individual broadcasters But not everyone will be able to enjoy the benefits of HD television. “It is completely uneconomic for the broadcasters to roll out terrestrial infrastructure for more than 75 percent of the population at this time,” says Browning. The rest of the population will have to settle for the standard definition satellite service. Despite this shortcoming, Browning is excited about what Freeview is accomplishing. “We’ve got to walk before we run,” he says. “It took a lot to bring the parties together to do straight linear digital TV, and moving to HD is a huge undertaking.” To call it a huge undertaking is almost an understatement. Freeview’s terrestrial platform will use the most up-to-date MPEG4 compression technologies available, and the rest of the world will be watching closely. “We’re one of the first in the world to do that,” enthuses Browning. “Just this week I’ve shared our specifications with five Asian countries. They’re all hoping to do the same thing as us, but we are one of the first digital terrestrial platforms to do it. “It’s quite fun to be first, but it’s also very risky. New Zealand is a pretty small country, so trying to demand that global manufacturers do things for you that they haven’t yet done for bigger markets is a real uphill battle. We spent a lot of time trying to persuade them to use New Zealand as a test market.” Browning says that Freeview will continue to embrace emerging technologies. “Throughout the next year or so, all the major manufacturers will deliver integrated HD TVs with built-in Freeview receivers,” says Browning. “So if you’re buying a new television you’ll be getting Freeview by default. “The next innovation is personal video recorders [PVRs] – the equivalent of MySky but in the free-to-air space. People can record one channel while watching another, and then watch [the recorded programme] at their convenience. I think people will be pretty excited about that. In effect you’re making the leap to digital, you’re replacing your VCR and you’re getting two tuners all at the same time, so it’s a pretty good solution.” And there’s still more on the horizon. Browning is keeping track of international digital TV developments with an eye to introducing new technologies here. “Freeview UK have just announced an on-demand capability that they’re hoping to bring to market next year via what’s called Push VOD, whereby the Freeview PVRs will start to receive programmes that have been ‘pushed’ overnight into that PVR. So in other words, that person doesn’t have to say ‘I want to record that show and I want to record it off TVONE tonight’. There will be a selection of programmes that just appear on their hard drive that they can choose from.” Browning suggests that a similar service could well be launched here at some stage. In the meantime, there’s still plenty to be inspired by. Digital television is well and truly here – and, as Steve Browning says, it’s all about choice. Next month, our digital broadcasting series continues with a look at TVNZ ondemand. 
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