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What's happened to Alex Encel?


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Whoa!

The "Encel Effect" is back! :blink::P

Run for cover! :D:P

BTW: I think there's some wierd blurring of issues going on here!

WRT to popularity of 7 vs 9 in Perth ... remember, JWH, too, is "extremely popular", we're told! Popularity and quality are often unrelated! :P

Seven has plenty of reasons why its been #1 in Perth, including its history, "perthonalities" (hate that term), and significantly, when it comes to the News ... Seven didn't totally stuff up big time, like Nine did when it misguidedly introduced its "Feminine Touch" - kicking out the blokes and forcing the ridiculous "one newsreader starts the sentence, the other completes it" hokum!

Also, in terms of most content, Nine can only accept what its given by the Packer Machine.

That said, technically, Nine does eat Seven for breakfast, however Ten showed us that a cheap, slick, populist vacuum can win the ratings ... it went ballistic with BB and similar cheap and/or imported shyte. Seven simply copied this with its garbage (Lost, Puking with the has-beens, Desperate Trash) etc, and Nine, somewhat constrained by its overweight corporate arrogance has been left in the ratings dust.

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From today's (or should that be tomorrow's :blink:) Age:

Saving digital TV needs no brain waves

April 15, 2006

IT'S a crazy world when a $20,000 phone card scandal can create headlines for weeks, but the Government needlessly spending around a billion dollars or so is virtually ignored as an issue. Yet that's the world we live in.

New figures obtained recently relating to government digital TV costs, combined with one of the alternative suggested closedown dates, 2015, show the Government could potentially approach savings of $1 billion by providing free basic and reliable set-top boxes (STB) for every working TV by 2007. The outlay to enjoy this saving is about $150 million.

If the Government acted decisively, everyone could be in the all-digital age by 2007, and it would have more dollars it could spend on education, hospitals, aged care or a multitude of uses preferable to propping up an inefficient dual-broadcast TV system.

The transition to digital in Australia has been beset by problems that were easily predicted from the outset and it is only when these problems are faced in a realistic fashion that any real progress can be made.

In the way it went about it, the Government set an impossible task for itself with digital television, one they could not hope to accomplish.

It failed to grasp a few fundamentals about what was involved. When judged against the Government's original aims, the system today is a failure.

Digital TV is unusual in that nearly all people need to adopt it for every television they own for clean analog closedown to be possible. By contrast most technologies only need a small percentage of take-up to be considered successful.

A key DTV problem is that the number of televisions greatly exceeds the number of households and each analog TV requires an STB to operate after analog closedown.

To make its task even harder, the Government set course into uncharted territory with a digital TV policy and specification unique to Australia, rather than wait and learn from the mistakes of others as we had done with the analog system.

We end up with an orphaned variation of the European DVB technology that makes mass production impossible and condemns consumers to higher prices and technology delays. Why make the degree of difficulty even more acute?

Also, why claim that you would achieve close to 100 per cent changeover by virtue of the quality your unique system offered? There was no historical basis for such optimism. Other technologies predicated purely on improved quality had failed and were long forgotten (Betamax, Elcaset, DAT) and these were aiming for a much lower success rate percentage.

As a business plan, what the Government proposed would fail to convince even the most foolhardy bank manager. Yet that was the plan they adopted. Little real incentive, like popular extra content, was offered to tempt consumers to change, yet the number of analog televisions necessary to change was enormous.

Inherent problems won't go away. Yet there is a precedent that is not so different in magnitude. The transition from dial phones to push button phones was relatively rapid. New phones were simply delivered for old, and being a laggard wasn't given as an option.

To fix the digital TV problem the Government needs to accept the reality of the situation and act decisively. Burying its head in the sand could needlessly waste in the vicinity of a $1 billion, and that's worth around eight basic STBs for every TV in Australia, when the modest supply of just one will suffice.

Alex Encel is chairman of Loewe and of TV Australasia Schaub-Lorenz

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John,

Seven is a disgrace to Digital Broadcasting, their 6.00 PM Sydney News shows a blurred shot of the Sydney Skyline ( yes blurred) how pathetic is that.As for widescreen sport your quote "precious widescreen sport" maybe you were tired & emotional making such a statement ,

Obviously in the year 2006 who would expect anything else.

Exactly.

As well as the crap news picture, all of the broadcastds from Martin place have a stuffed field order on SD.

How can one forget the constant complaints that Seven did not show all of its sports in Widescreen? One would have thought their centralization/ modernization has cost a lot of jobs (there was an outcry is this thread that Perth Seven has been gutted).

Even after broadcast operations were movd, they still did the 4:3 thing.

I cannot comment on the image you are getting with Seven news in Sydney, the news looks OK in Perth. Going by the ratings, it would appear that the majority of the Aussie population doesn’t share your concern about Seven’s “blurry” pictures

The news looks crap in Perth. You can see the artifacts on the pan in at the start and most of the reports suffer extremely bad artifacting the second something moves.

Even with Nine's Virtual Set that looks fake because you cannot render realistic video in 720x576, Nine's news looks far better and doesn't suffer the severe artifacting that Seven has.

WRT to popularity of 7 vs 9 in Perth ... remember, JWH, too, is "extremely popular", we're told! Popularity and quality are often unrelated! :blink:

Definately.

Seven has plenty of reasons why its been #1 in Perth, including its history, "perthonalities" (hate that term), and significantly, when it comes to the News ... Seven didn't totally stuff up big time, like Nine did when it misguidedly introduced its "Feminine Touch" - kicking out the blokes and forcing the ridiculous "one newsreader starts the sentence, the other completes it" hokum!

I have never seen that sentence thing. Seven News is nothing but an advert for their sponsors, programs and whatever line they want to push with small bits of news to pad it out.

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......

That said, technically, Nine does eat Seven for breakfast, however Ten showed us that a cheap, slick, populist vacuum can win the ratings ... it went ballistic with BB and similar cheap and/or imported shyte. Seven simply copied this with its garbage (Lost, Puking with the has-beens, Desperate Trash) etc, and Nine, somewhat constrained by its overweight corporate arrogance has been left in the ratings dust.

For loveliness of pictures you will get no argument from me. For example the wedding scenes from Judging Amy were gorgeous (lots of stunning flowers etc) and yes the endless CSI variations are lovely to look at but one can take only so much of Brachemhiemer’s (sp?)shows.

But when it comes to Ten, I have lot of problem spotting huge differences between that an Sevens stuff (perhaps the way the shows have been shot or the low bit rate reported by ChampionR.

“Lost” trash :P , that one of the few shows I watch on Seven (apart from Deal Or Know Deal :blink: ). But IMHO content is king and folks would put up with the picture quality offered by Foxtel if a popular program was served up.

This is where IMHO the HD crowd get it wrong; DTV needs to offer so much more than more pixels.

From today's (or should that be tomorrow's :P) Age:
To fix the digital TV problem the Government needs to accept the reality of the situation and act decisively. Burying its head in the sand could needlessly waste in the vicinity of a $1 billion, and that's worth around eight basic STBs for every TV in Australia, when the modest supply of just one will suffice.

Perhaps this warrants more discussion. Government subsidization of STBs has happened elsewhere; if the government is to receive huge returns for selling of the bandwidth gobbled up by analogue, perhaps this would be cost effective.

How much does it cost the networks to simulcast analogue, would it be cost effective for them to help subsidize this program if they could retire the analogue broadcasts.

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How much does it cost the networks to simulcast analogue, would it be cost effective for them to help subsidize this program if they could retire the analogue broadcasts.

Well, it must cost them something in maintenace, and one assumes that for all networks, that can't be a small amount, especially over the next 6 or so years that analogue is currently scheduled to be broadcast.

So I say, we make them pay for it all, one basic SD STB per household, if ppl want more or a HD STB, then they can pay for it themselves. The cost to each network would be based on the % of total ratings for 2005, as such the government would then cover the % for ABC and SBS and the other 3 for the amount of their audience share.

Given that the networks bidded for the footy for 5 years at $750 million, then the estimated cost of $150 million for a STB for each household, split between 7,9,10 and the government, offset by maintenance cost on analogue for the next few years, then it really wouldn't be all that much and come 1st January 2008 we could be the first country to completely switch off analogue TV.

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...

Perhaps this warrants more discussion. Government subsidization of STBs has happened elsewhere; if the government is to receive huge returns for selling of the bandwidth gobbled up by analogue, perhaps this would be cost effective.

How much does it cost the networks to simulcast analogue, would it be cost effective for them to help subsidize this program if they could retire the analogue broadcasts.

Even the uber-free marketeers in the US have allocated $US1.5 billion to subsidise a changeover (is it more than a coincidence that the US has been the other major market to push HD and now find themeselves having to bribe people to take up DTV?). Each eligible household will receive $US40...

Whether such a program would work here would depend on the alternative applications for the spectrum, the value of those alternatives and the political will of a Government that would have to make the decision to shut off analog.

It doesn't actually cost the broadcasters anything extra to run both analog and digital. The broadcasters got their digital spectrum for free, and I think the reasonable expectation is that the broadcasters would be required to hand back their analog spectrum. This is in part because unlike other services such as mobile telephony which see spectrum auctioned off with the purchaser free to do with it what they choose, broadcasters must return some of their profits to the Government in return for getting the spectrum for nothing.

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......

It doesn't actually cost the broadcasters anything extra to run both analog and digital. The broadcasters got their digital spectrum for free.....

IMHO, the broadcasters have never got anything out of this "free" spectrum but the extra hassle of broadcasting in both the digital and analogue formats. Operating and maintaining the analogue equipment must cost them something.

Each eligible household will receive $US40...

One gets the impression that STBs are a little more expensive in the States, wonder how many families will be out of pocket.

While thinking AE figure of $10 is a little ambitious, one would have thought the @ a few million, the STB could be brought into Australia at less then $40 a unit (from memory AE's article claimed that some boxes were being landed in Australia @$30 by the importers ATM)

http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/tim...2098529788.html

……Because of economies of scale and the fact that no middlemen would be involved, the cost of a basic no-frills set top box could be getting as low as $10 a unit depending on the final specification. This is not a fanciful figure.

Already low-cost boxes priced at about $30 a unit are exported to Australia, but as these are ordered in thousands, not millions, and built to unique Australian requirements, there's a heavier front-end charge. ….

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IMHO, the broadcasters have never got anything out of this "free" spectrum but the extra hassle of broadcasting in both the digital and analogue formats. Operating and maintaining the analogue equipment must cost them something.

...

Sorry - in terms of extra cost, I meant that in terms of spectrum costs...

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You have to be kidding the percentage of people downloading US crap such as Lost or Desperate Housewives insert another crap title here off the internet is mimiscule in the overall scheme of things I cant see that being a major future threat as most viewers are not that desperate to resort to downloadingTV shows.

Internet's power haunts networks

By Michael Idato

April 17, 2006

Television and the web. Not since Antony and Cleopatra have we seen such an uneasy, unholy union. Consumers are hungry for it. Broadcasters are terrified of it. And well they should be - if the internet has its way, broadcast television could soon be tumbleweed in the dust. "You'd give it 15 years?" quipped one senior - cyber-savvy - television executive when The Guide put the point on the table last week. "I'm not sure I'd give it that long."

In the US, the media giant Disney has made the bold decision to provide several big shows - Desperate Housewives, Lost, Commander-in-Chief and Alias - as free streaming video through the ABC network's website. Don't get too excited about it - the website will be configured to block access from outside the US, a concession to protect the established fiefdoms of conventional television distribution. But for how long?

US networks have embraced the new world order, providing the debut episodes of Everybody Hates Chris, Supernatural, Fat Actress and Dick Wolf's Conviction on the web. Ten deserves some applause for handing out DVDs of the Supernatural pilot to cinema patrons before its launch here but the Australian industry's approach to alternative methods of delivery has been anything from sluggish to downright naive.

Executives from the industry's cretaceous period have long dismissed downloading shows as the stuff of pimply teenagers in darkened rooms pulling down episodes of Smallville. Last year, the industry body Free TV dismissed the threat, citing the small penetration and high cost of broadband. That response never sat well with the numbers - 1.2 million homes have broadband access and many plans have fallen below $20 a month.

The reality is that the lounge room of the future - a Windows XP media-centre box that plays television, DVDs and internet content, including downloaded shows - is already here. Plan A should be to embrace the internet and, through trial and error, begin building television's brave new world before the old one collapses. Plan B - a far less desirable outcome - is to do nothing and watch television's global village become a ghost town.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/inte...4521541371.html

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  • 1 month later...

Anyone want to pay $145 to attend a 'Recognising Alex Encel' function? :blink:

I just received an invitation in the mail to attend a function called "Recognising Alex Encel". Well, talk about a laugh, the organisers are asking $145 a head for punters to "hear Alex share his experience, insights and vision for the future" - I wouldn't go if they paid me $1000! Here's the guy who imports Loewe TV's - the product that gave me more stress than any other I've sold in the 34 years I've worked in the business - and then buried his head in the sand when confronted with the facts pertaining to the horrific breakdown rate. I figure his main insight would be where his next $1,000,000 is coming from. I reckon whoever sent me the invite was taking the piss (I hope so anyway).
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HAHAHA! :blink:

I've peered into my crystal ball and can reveal the key points from AE's talk:

- Bung a pretentious Euro name on everything you import (q.v. Schaub Lorenz). Never underestimate the brand snobbery of Australians.

- If you import something, don't let facts inconvenience you. HDTVs will always stay above $20,000. Consumers won't buy big screens. HD-STBs won't show HD pictures on an SD set (funny, but the bloke to whom AE was responding never said they would).

- Be happy to stock crap if it sells easily (e.g. Bose).

Others are welcome to have a look into the crystal ball. Please post your results below.

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