I imagine that the fact that New Zealand free to air satellite TV is unencrypted and can be received with a cheap FTA box helps massively with reducing the burden of not being served by terrestrial.
Here you have to get the expensive VAST boxes (which are $250+ minimum on their own) along with the bureaucratic rigmorole of registration and potentially registration certificates or travellers passes if you are in an area deemed ‘adequately served’ which is a significant barrier to most people.
Feel like we should have replaced Optus Aurora with a Ku-band spot beam system, in theory this could have allowed for reception to be limited at a state/territory level providing the terrestrial broadcasters some degree of protection.
Good luck telling the incumbents in a terrestrially-served market that they’re going to have to give up their patch to the VAST service though - given all the industry complaining I see in the radio allocation/licensing threads here, I could only imagine that it would have been even worse at the start of Freeview here! Though now that the regional TV industry is slowly consolidating, that may be moot in a few years.
But that’s probably why Freeview (NZ) Satellite seems to have been promoted on an equal footing and not entirely a second class citizen over there (apart from lack of HD) - you get the vast majority of what’s on Freeview HD terrestrial, and it’s still TVNZ 1/2/Duke, Three, Bravo, Prime and Maori TV regardless of where you go. No need to “protect” a remote broadcaster like here - is why they appear to be comfortable with Freeview HD only reaching 87% of homes over there.
Queenstown used to have about 6 translators across town in the analogue days to ensure maximum coverage. Even then it was only TV1, TV2 and TV3 in the majority of places
Terrestrial to Satellite happened in some locations when we did the digital switchover - they weren’t big population areas (so the economics of going digital didn’t make sense) and there were financial incentives offered.
The “Regional TV Industry” has suggested a number of times that there are a collection of retransmission sites where it should be considered to move them to Satellite delivery rather than maintain the terrestrial sites. It never seems to get any traction politically, but that’s almost unsurprising.
In 2017 I went to NZ and stayed in a small town called Waipu which is about 50km south of Whangarei but was served only by satellite even in a high location. In Australia, there would either be coverage from the larger town or there would be a low power translator.
I think that’s probably the main driver. I guess it highlights how different an unregulated market (NZ) is in comparison to the more regulated one Australia has.
A few followups on other comments: The only channel offering regional differences (in Ad’s only) is TVNZ1. Hamilton and Auckland aren’t a SFN as far as I’m aware. Satellite is unencrypted, designed as infill for tiny or hard-to-broadcast-to places like Queenstown, Blenheim &c.
The UK is certainly a different kettle of fish, though. They certainly went for quantity over quality (especially on the commercial muxes) - not even trying HD until DVB-T2 could be implemented - and had much more spectrum to play with, with some places using as many as nine channels briefly if you count local and temporary muxes for T2 transition (which is slowly being clawed back so Ofcom can clear the 700 MHz spectrum for mobiles, something we did a long time ago).
If there’s anything to blame for similar lack of channels here, it’d more likely be the total lack of planning or interest in anything to do with the vacant sixth channel. And that is a bit chicken and egg - the current situation leaves a player like Discovery having to do content deals with the incumbents rather than running their own channel, but I’m not sure why would they want to do that in 2022 if they could just set up and point people to a local Discovery Plus and get the demographics they want there, for instance?
As for clearing 600 MHz here, it will surely happen - just when, I’m not sure. The current 5G spectrum isn’t really appropriate for rural coverage, but the telcos will likely try also look at old frequencies as @Radiohead suggested, particularly the 850 band that Telstra have been using for 3G (and is often quite a lifeline in rural areas), which’ll get turned off mid-2024. ACMA recently an auction for 850+900 MHz spectrum for use after that time which Optus and Telstra bought spectrum, and that’ll be crucial for regional areas. But the fact that clearing 600 “sooner rather than later” appears almost inevitable is likely to stagnate further plans until then.
All good! Also realising this is starting to drift off topic for digital radio but I’ll let mods split or move as required.
The “600 MHz” band is the mobile band that Australian UHF channels 40-51 currently sit on right now; specifically, between 610 - 694 MHz. This has already been re-allocated for 5G service in the US as of 2020, for instance, and this is the band at stake when we’re talking about TV stations losing channels here.
Above that is the “700 MHz” band where channels 52-69 used to sit - that was cleared with our post-digital switchover restack in the middle of last decade; and is used as part of 4G services in Australia now.
5G service on the 600 MHz band would theoretically be slower than the current spectrum (which is at about 3.5 GHz or so), but would likely have greater coverage, so it and other low-end spectrum would likely be important in extending rural coverage of 5G technology, much like the 700 MHz band is used in 4G, and like 850 MHz (just above the original UHF TV band) crucially was with Telstra’s 3G network.
see corrections in the next few posts to the following paragraph, pardon me The fourth commercial network channel, as far as I’m aware, is still being temporarily made available to the two remaining community broadcasters (C31 in Melbourne and 44 Adelaide) in lieu of anything else - those licences expire in mid-2024 as well. They might have been used for the 3D TV trials at an earlier time, but otherwise would just be the digital equivalent of static right now.
AFAIK the space assigned for the fourth commercial channel is still vacant (VHF10 in the major cities) while C31/44 are using “borrowed” capacity on the UHF band.
I believe the 3D trials that took place a while back were also on “borrowed” UHF channels: Sydney (UHF35), Melbourne (UHF35), Brisbane (UHF31), Adelaide (UHF31), Perth (UHF38) and the Gold Coast (UHF50).
this was the ridiculousness of the government pushing on with removing community TV from broadcasting, they were banging on about the sector using up this valuable spectrum while all along there is a spare channel just sitting there doing nothing.
Also realising this is starting to drift off topic for digital radio but I’ll let mods split or move as required.