While flipping through my old caps for another thread, I stumbled on a capture of MyTalk, which to me almost justifies a thread on its own, but it’s another topic which has some fairly scattered discussion on here, and I felt would be good to have a single spot to collate.
For some history, the VPG channels launched close to the launch of digital TV on the metro networks as one of the allowed forms of what was termed ‘datacasting’ - DTV was planned before the widespread adoption of broadband internet, and the idea was that channels of ‘data’ would be a way to provide the public with lots of information, with the original digital TV planning having 2 channels in each market set aside for datacast - one of these went to air as a trial - Digital 44 in Sydney, which had an all channel VPG as the “main” channel on LCN 4 (shot on Wikipedia)
The metro O&O networks (Nine Perth/Adelaide never had them) used these to provide more or less the same thing, a small preview of the main channel (with audio), and then the current programming and a scroll through the night’s shows and in most cases another spot for advertising banners for shows.
When the first taste of multichannels happened - the HD opt-out programming in 2007, most of these went away, as the networks put more bits towards the HD channels themselves, and added full “EPG” data rather than just the Now and Next program information that most networks had for all of digital TV up to that point.
Eventually the datacast regulations were loopholed into becoming the channels full of ads that still exist to this day - each of them needed their own ACMA datacasting license, so the Guide channels to some extent live on now as Extra/TVSN/Gecko.
Anyway, now the pictures.
Nine:
Firstly, the oldest example I have, and not my own cap,
Then here’s some newer ones from the box era, Nine really was the only one that really had it keep track with their general on air presentation.
Seven -
Ten -
Bonus broken version:
SBS launched with SBS essential, but I don’t have a cap to hand. It closed down years before the others, though lasted a bit after the original version of the World News Channel.
Finally, the only real regional TV example, myTalk, which got added to all the Southern Cross stations - aired State Focus on loop, and then closed down. Note the mouse cursor in the corner…
A very good post from tvcl has a number of extra shots.
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