Does someone have a clean video of the SCA-produced 9Life ident from 2016? I’m sure @NQCQTV2 has one, but it’s in a “feed comparison” video so the audio is overlayed. It was basically the late 2015 “happening now on channel 94” promo, but with a different song and slightly modified visuals.
Was channel surfing and came across this advertising board at a 1987 VFL game on FOX Footy regarding “Sportsplay”, which I’ve never heard of.
Does anyone know what it is? (I’m assuming it’s TV of some sort). Or is it radio or something else,
As far as I’m aware, SportsPlay was an early satellite service which provided sports & entertainment programming to pubs, clubs and hotels.
This service, along with rival Club Superstation (which if I’m not mistaken, was owned Robert Holmes à Court - a young Peter Overton got his start in TV there and later Sky Channel) would eventually merge with the then-Bond Media owned Sky Channel, presumably because the market wasn’t big enough for three players:
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Hi,
How many “This is where we live” Promos that Prime made
I’m interested if anyone has caps of the short-lived “rebuilt” WIN HD service from 2010 after reading older posts… Was there a HD bug?
Also, how was the 2008-2009 era managed?
Whatever the tally is, add at least one for New Zealand 1998-2001. I still have that damned jingle stuck in my head.
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Good evening all.
Could anyone confirm if on 1 January 2001, the stations were broadcasting HD simulcasts as well as the standard definition 576i?
Also, would happen to guess the bitrate they would have used? I’m guessing that with 23mbps per transport stream and in a time BEFORE multi-channels, the quality would be much much higher than the ~3-4mbps we have, today!
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I’d imagine that any HD services in the very early, pre-VPG days of Digital TV were at a high bitrate but weren’t continuously simulcasting the programming on SD/analogue.
Often the HD channels would’ve been running a demonstration loop (usually during retail hours) or even off air entirely to allocate bandwidth for multiview/datacast services.
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My understanding is that HD did not commence immediately on digital launch. And even when it did they it was mostly just demo loops with only limited program content in HD, although networks did have an obligated quota of HD program content but it was something like only 3 hours a day. One episode of Sunrise for instance could have fulfilled Seven’s daily quota.
It was not until 2007 that channels were allowed to run exclusive HD program content, which is what triggered break-out programming on 7HD and Ten HD, and later 9HD.
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It may not answer the question, but i’ll just share this anyway as it’s somewhat relevant. Apparently Channel Seven only wanted SD, what a surprise! It may have changed from the initial plan by 2001 though.
Video Credit: ‘CheesyTV’
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A lot did change at the last minute. So much so that manufacturers were limited as to what they could actually put out to market because the specs kept changing. So even when digital began on 01.01.01 nobody could have even bought a tuner to watch it. The ABC even struggled to get enough set top boxes so they could do their own signal tests
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Anyone active in this community last decade will recall the resentment towards Seven as they refused to broadcast actual HD (They instead broadcast 576p and labeled it as HD) right up until they commenced breakaway programming
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I recall the word ‘bodge’
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Channel 4:3 sure did drag behind.
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A few random thoughts on this.
The bit rates on the 1080i HD channels of 9 and 10 were around 15Mbps and fixed rather than dynamic as now. See above for Seven!
There was no real program content in HD. You were lucky to get a 16:9 aspect program. The earliest 16:9 programs outside news/sport tended to be Australian with US shows especially lagging badly in that area. Survivor had to wait until 2008 for widescreen.
When a 16:9 show did come along there was a lot of problems working out how to correctly broadcast it. Here’s what 9 did to the first episode of Star Trek Enterprise in 2001 
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15mbps?!?!
Fascinating!
That is absolutely incredible. Though I imagine finding HDTV mpeg2 recordings of 2001-2003 recordings would be near impossible.
why local bug #myfriend ???
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Here’s a random question arising from a discussion about Neighbours on another forum. I remember that Ten inadvertently skipped an episode in early 2004, and it’s reported that this episode was never shown in Australia. At the time, I believe there were still affiliates who were screening Neighbours themselves and not via the Ten feed as the JV Ten channels weren’t yet up and running or weren’t available on analogue. Southern Cross in Darwin, Tassie, Remote/Central and GTS/BKN, WIN in SA and WA maybe? So is it possible these stations had a tape of the episode and actually showed it? ISTR some of them showed it earlier in the day, but they may have been behind Ten if they were relying on recording it from a network feed. Did affiliates who were time shifting content - due to joint affiliation or otherwise - normally get sent tapes or did they record programs from a clean feed and therefore couldn’t transmit something before it had been shown on the network?
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Normally a station time-shifting a program would record it as the network was airing it from the regular program link. Where a station was likely to require to air a program in advance of the main network transmission, or perhaps at a slightly different time due to lottos or live sport etc, the program was usually pre-fed on a different link earlier that day or perhaps a few days earlier. Since the introduction of Satellites and then digital links, tapes were rarely shipped around, unless a particular station required an entire series that was not shown by the rest of the network.
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Thanks @shadowmask.
I remember when Tasmania had different DST dates to the mainland, it would be 8pm in Tas when it was 7pm in VIC/NSW for a few weeks. Evidently SC Tas couldn’t run programming before the network, as shows like H&A would be shown a week behind the mainland (though SC was still jointly affiliated with Ten at the time as well so didn’t necessarily follow Seven’s scheduling). However, they ran H&A at 7pm, evidently recording it off the network feed the previous week rather than showing it “live” at 8pm - either they couldn’t have the show pre-fed to them, or Seven didn’t want it to debut on an affiliate (even an hour earlier) before it went out in their own markets.
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