@Petarkco, @Moe & @bacco007 are correct.
@NRN11 Yes that’s my workplace, my office is downstairs, but I spend quite a many hour in that TX hall. It’s changed a lot since that video was made, & it’s going to be changing quite a lot more over the next 6 months.
In your location, if you can buy a three legged tower that were once commonplace in the Riverland, I’d buy one and a rotator for easy adjustment.
There was an article in The Guide in SMH this week looking back at 20 years of digital TV in Australia.
From the article:
“Today the broadcasters each have two HD channels”
Nope. Not Ten or ABC. I sometimes wonder about that guy’s writing. It often contains inaccuracies.
…not to mention that SBS actually has three!
Richard Wilkins mentioned the first broadcast of Digital TV at 0:07 of this clip during the broadcast of NYE 2000.
What was interactive TV like on free to air during the early days of Digital TV in Australia?
I know Foxtel had interactive services in the past before switching them off last year.
It only worked on a small handful of STBs (upon first use just one Teac STB IIRC), and it was only used for sports (e.g Nine Sports Active, Ten also used it at the time but had no special branding covering its use) and in Nines case, a couple of the Test Australia specials (like the national IQ test).
By 2006-2007 they no longer bothered and the STBs that supported the tech were already discontinued.
Not many people used the interactive services on FTA. What was Nine sports active like.
my recollection in 2018 from a demonstration of interactive TV in 1999
I’ve only seen one once in person - it was at a physical Dodo store - not the little tiny kiosks they have now, but a full sized store. I don’t remember if it was even plugged in to a TV - certainly never got to see actually that interactive TV.
The biggest issue was that we didn’t follow the UK standard for interactive TV - so they couldn’t just adapt boxes or TVs for the biggest DVB-T markets.
Changing to the much more common MHEG standard was done with the ‘Freeview’ launch, but by then we’ve got so much broadband that supplying multi-view or interactivity over DVB-T makes no sense, it’s all now just links off to go to the internet.
It’s really worth noting that our digital standards were chosen at a time when the Government assumed that the digital dividend spectrum would be filled with interactive datacast channels - which TVAU just described a little bit of in the post that popped up mid me typing this - that’s really what the future was seen to be.
Has anyone got any screen shots of this?
Here’s one I found showing the options of what was available. I only remember it being on Channel Nine and I’m not even sure if it was on WIN in the regional areas. It was so obscure being only on the one type of STB the Teac ITV-500 - I didn’t realise there were later other models.
It was similar to the Foxtel red button but that got phased out a year or two ago too.
Some information about the Teac receiver from the time is still up on the Internet Archive.
The specs page mentions the MHEG-5 and DVB-HTML standards, although that probably doesn’t mean too much.
The TEAC STB was $299
if I recall correctly, it was about $800 at launch
Some more screenshots I found from my archives of datacasting/interactive services:
Macquarie channel:
7 Cricket:
Interactive Pompeii:
ACC datacast:
D44 Guide:
Olympics:
7 VPG:
Another version of the 7 VPG:
Election:
Melbourne Cup:
9 VPG:
9 Election - first shot is the main channel and the second is the multichannel:
Olympics - Prime View 1:
Olympics - Prime View 2:
SBS Essential:
Digital 4 VPG:
Teletext, which lasted into the digital years for a while:
