Second that - Digitec was the only HD STB available
At the time the cheapest HD TV available was around $4800 and those came with an analogue tuner!
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Multichannels were only allowed from SBS and ABC but they were so heavily restricted, they could only target niche markets and essentially couldn’t show anything the majority of people would watch. I think the first multichannels were ABC with ABC Kids (the first incarnation) during the day and then at night it switched to Fly TV with Triple J. On SBS, the SBS World News Channel was there but it wasn’t allowed to show anything in English.
Even when ABC2 first started there were lots of restrictions on the type of content they could show.
The first multichannels from the commercials became the Guide channels and later the breakaway HD programming.
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IIRC ABC2 was forbidden from carrying any content classed as “entertainment” during this whole period!
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HD equipment was more expensive, even in 2005, HD STBs were about $400 vs $200 for an SD box and none were MPEG4.
Using MPEG 2, fitting 3 HD channels plus audio into the available bandwidth would have been a stretch to maintain an acceptable picture.
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Yeah it was ABC Kids from 6am to 6pm and then Fly TV from 6pm. I’m not sure if Fly was on air through to 6am or what time it signed off at night. I didn’t really watch either of these channels although Fly did do a repeat screening of that reality show classic Sylvania Waters.
Yeh, lots of re-runs and timeshifted stuff from the main channel like Australian Story, At The Movies and The New Inventors. It became known as The New Inventors Channel in our house as it seemed every time we flicked past ABC2 that show was on! They’d also fill up whole blocks of airtime by showing each state’s version of Stateline one after the other.
They somehow snuck in re-runs of The Glass House while still technically not allowed to show “entertainment” but that was about it.
ABC2 started in 2005 but I think it was 2008 before the strict genre controls on the ABC and SBS multi-channels was lifted.
The restrictions placed on ABC and SBS were so tight IIRC that SBS could not even show English-language news bulletins on its World News Channel. I think ABC2 at least managed Four Corners repeats and they had a nightly show called Australia Wide, featuring some of the lower level news stories from ABC News across the country.
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Yep, it was about 2008 or even 2009 before things started getting a bit easier for the multichannels.
Australia Wide originally started as an hour long program I think or at least half hour before having a few revamps and getting shortened to 15 minutes. Australia Wide was like an early version of WIN’s All Australian News. Stateline blocks however were definitely a staple in the early days.
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What is AC-3?
A coder that is lesser quality to MPEG4 perhaps?
AC-3 and mpeg-2 describe the sound. AC-3 support Dolby surround. Still used today.
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Anybody remember which year the 7 day EPG came about to replace the now and next only information? It wasn’t until about 2008 or 2008 from memory. My best set top box was the Topfield TF5000 which allowed additional programs to be written for it with the API, some great programs were written for that including one which scraped the 7 day TV guide from Ninemsn and imported it into the STB giving 7 day EPG for recording schedules about 5 years before other brands were able to when the broadcasting started. Other apps allowed full UI customisation and channel logos etc… and little things like a 3 minute ad skip button which was brilliant - ad break starts, press the red button and program is ready straight away again!
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The lack of EPG information outside of now and next spawned businesses such as IceTV that tried to fill the gap. IIRC 7 day EPG programming came in around the time IceTV won the lawsuit that Nine brought against them relating to “breach of copyright” for providing EPG data independently back in 2009 (bitter irony being that IceTVs sole purpose was always going to be thrown by the wayside as soon as the networks implemented full EPGs).
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That’s right, I forgot about IceTV. I think the guy who started that was one of the original Topfield app developers also and it spawned from that original idea for the other brands.
AC3 is Dolby Digital, so it can be either in mono, 2.0 Dolby Surround or up to Dolby Digital EX 5.1, remember back in the day Nine used to play movies in DD-EX especially Harry Potter.
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I don’t know what the character limit for LCN names is, but “ABC COMEDY/KIDS” wouldn’t really be that long of an LCN name when you consider that NBN used to have obscenely long ones (which did get cut off on the EPGs of some devices, from memory) like “NBN Digital Mid North Coast” up until around 2014 when the “Digital” was dropped from the LCN name(s) of the main channel.
Of course these days, the style of the LCN names in the non-overlap NBN regions matches those of Nine in metro areas (eg, “Nine Mid North Coast” and “9HD Mid North Coast”) although the NSW Central Coast oddly has “Nine-NBN Central Coast” and “9HD Central Coast”. Wonder how the situation is like up on the Gold Coast…
Apologies for the double post, but the channel name for LCN-22 is now “ABC Comendy/Kids” - yes, the misspelling is real:
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“You had one job, Mike!”
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I commend your effort for spotting that.
This is why dyslexic people shouldn’t work in the EPG department.
Which is why they’re all in the news graphics department.
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I’m going to write a very stern letter to the ABC.
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