HD version of Freeview satellite on the horizon
Freeview says it could switch its satellite broadband service from standard definition to HD ‘‘in a couple of years’’.
Chief executive Sam Irvine said the company had held ‘‘initial discussions’’ with broadcasters such as Television New Zealand and Mediaworks about the investment.
The upgrade would mean sharper TV pictures for hundreds of thousands of households.
But Freeview satellite customers with older set-top boxes or televisions would need to buy a new set-top box costing from $70.
Irvine said an upgrade would be made possible by a new satellite television transmission standard, called DVB-S2, which uses more advanced compression technology than the earlier DVB-S standard.
It meant channels could be transmitted in HD without requiring Freeview invest in any expensive additional satellite capacity, he said.
‘‘Viewers’ expectations now are that most content will be in HD.’’
The downside is that older and ‘‘unapproved’’ set-top boxes and Freeview televisions that are only designed to receive standard definition broadcasts would not be able to pick up the new signals.
Irvine believed most people who had bought approved devices within the past three years would not face issues with the switch. ‘‘There are a bunch of unapproved products out there which probably won’t support HD.’’
If people received Freeview broadcasters direct to an older TV that would not support the new HD format, they would not need to throw it away, he said.
That was because they could instead buy a new set-box that supported S2 and plug their TV into that. Broadcasters would also have to upgrade the uplinks they used to get their channels into space, Irvine said.
‘‘We need to go through a period of consultation with transmission providers, Freeview broadcasters and set-top box and TV manufacturers.
‘‘It certainly won’t be in the next year, but it may be a couple of years away.’’
About 40 per cent of Freeview customers watched its free-to-air television service using satellite dishes, Irvine said.
‘‘We are seeing satellite remaining quite strong on Freeview.’’
The remainder watched its terrestrial Freeviewhd service, which needs a UHF aerial and is already in high definition.
About 13 per cent of people living outside big towns can’t get Freeviewhd and Irvine believed some others chose it because they found it simpler to plug their settop box or TV into an existing Sky Television satellite dish.
Sky TV has emphasised the migration of TV from satellite to the internet, in documents supporting its proposed merger with Vodafone NZ.
That has prompted speculation satellite TV could be on the way out. Sky and Freeview rely on two Optus satellites, D1 and D2, that are only expected to remain in stationary orbit until 2021.
However, Optus launched a new satellite, Optus-10, in 2014 that appears to be configured with the goal in mind of supporting TV transmissions to New Zealand beyond that date.
Irvine said there were other potential providers, and new technologies were expected to bring down the high cost of new launches.
Rising house prices and rising net migration go hand in hand. Or so goes the popular narrative. Yet the facts are more complex.
In the absence of a clear immigration policy and articulate experts, the conversations are tinged with suspicion at best, racism at worst.
House prices are linked to net migration, but there are other factors too.
When there is a surge in net migration, it increases the demand for housing and therefore prices.
But these increases tend to be temporary and cyclical. As the supply of new housing catches up, these cyclical increases in house prices should dissipate.
The accumulated and seemingly inexorable increases in house prices since the early 1990s suggest that it is not cyclical factors like net migration that are driving up house prices over long periods of time.
Net migration can move violently, from a net loss of 3,200 people four years ago to a net gain of 69,000 people over the past year.
The cycles have a big impact, but the cumulative impact on housing demand is smaller than most understand.
The number of households in New Zealand grew by just over 1 million between the 1961 and 2013 censuses. Most of the increase came from natural population growth (that is, births exceeding deaths), which contributed 61 per cent of those one million extra households.
An additional 30 per cent of the increase came from families becoming smaller. The number of people per household has reduced over time, from around 4 people in 1961 to 2.7 people in 2013.
The remaining 9 per cent of the demand came from net migration.
It is not the scale of the demand that is the issue, rather the cycle and sudden changes.
There are two broad issues with immigration.
The first is the issue of population migration.
It is for many a taboo subject, even though migration has been at the core of New Zealand’s history.
New Zealand has no clearly articulated population strategy: we do not know how big a population we want, or why and how to manage migration to get there.
As a result, immigration is the topic of much discussion, but always without a guiding principle of what we are trying to achieve with it. We urgently need a policy discussion about a population strategy that sets out how many people we want and how immigration fits within it.
The second issue is that housing supply is slow to respond to rapid changes in population (which are usually driven by migration cycles).
The policy response to this must look at what could be done to speed up housing supply, spanning issues around land supply, infrastructure, infill, building, consenting and inspecting.
We need to be careful about understanding which policies to pursue, who to bring to the country and who to stop entering the country and how.
The surge in net migration in recent years is very good case in point. The acceleration in net migration has been driven by, in descending order of importance, fewer people leaving New Zealand for Australia, more New Zealanders coming back from Australia, more people arriving on work visas (usually to fill skill vacancies), and more students.
If we are to use immigration policies to reduce net migration, presumably it will be to reduce those segments that are rising the most.
Since we cannot deny New Zealanders entry or force them to leave for Australia, this has to mean reducing the numbers of workers, students and residents coming into the country.
We seem to rely on migrants to fill the deficiencies in our education and training, leading to persistent skills shortages across a number of sectors.
We are also addicted to population growth to pay for unfunded fiscal promises like universal health and super that cannot be paid for with a dwindling pool of taxpayers.
In general, New Zealand has a long history of migration and societal change, and has accepted and adapted to changes in our ethnic and cultural make-up.
But we lack a clearly articulated population strategy and, consequently, a clearly articulated immigration policy.
We need to talk about immigration openly. Not through the lenses of envy and racism, but through a reasoned and deliberate discussion on why we want immigration, how many people we want and what kind of people we want.
Having a clearly articulated strategy on population, whatever that may be, would create a common base for all of us to work from.