20 August 2003

South African TV channel to launch in UK on 22 September Ray Woodward passes on the news that a South African TV channel called New South African Television (NSat) is launching on the Sky digital platform next month. According to its Web site NSat TV will be available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. They're clearly not expecting to become a mass market channel as advertising rates start at the princely sum of  £12! It's also not clear to me (maybe someone knows) if it's going to be Free to Air, part of the basic Sky family package, or a premium subscription channel. Since they refer to their launch date having been put back a month by Sky, I'm assuming they'll be using basic encryption. http://www.nsat.tv 6:36:31 PM     comment on this entry []

Stones pull out of live Amsterdam concert Tonight's planned concert by the Rolling Stones in the Amsterdam Arena, which was to have been broadcast live across Europe, has been cancelled. The official reason is that Mick Jagger has a bad throat. Earlier in the day it was announced that the radio broadcast, due to be heard in 25 countries, would not go ahead as the European Broadcasting Union could not reach agreement on the fee for broadcasting rights with the Stones' management. However, at that time the concert was still planned to go ahead, with live TV coverage here on RTL4. Now comes the news that the whole concert is off. The 50,000 ticket holders have been told that the Stones will try to come back in September, on a date to be announced, but ticket holders who can't attend on the rearranged date will get a refund. Presumably, in the meantime, further efforts will be made to settle the pan-European radio rights dispute. Convenient, eh? 5:48:06 PM     comment on this entry []

RTE fires up 252 kHz again Thanks to Gerald Gray and Mike Guy for drawing my attention to the fact that Irish public broadcaster RTE is again testing the longwave transmitter on 252 kHz. Gerald writes: "RTE Radio 1 is currently using the 252kHz LW in Trim Co. Meath as at 0030 GMT on 20/8/03. Seems rather weaker than Atlantic 252 used to be, so maybe it's not running the full 100kW night time power. Haven't had a chance to hear it in the daytime, so I'm not sure whether it's still testing and whether it's using 500kW." Well, at 1005 UTC this morning they were carrying a test tone, so obviously this is not (yet) a regular service. Mike notes that when relaying Radio 1 the audio is delayed by several seconds. I initially wrote here that I doubted the delay was so long, but several people have confirmed that it is. I therefore assume they're feeding the audio from Dublin via ISDN, and the delay is caused by the encoding process. So far, RTE hasn't mentioned the longwave tests on its Web site or in a press release. BTW I am officially on vacation this week, so I cannot update the main Web site or check mail to media@rnw.nl. If you have breaking media news to report, please avail yourself of the E-mail link at the left hand side of this page, and items of interest will be added to the Weblog as soon as possible. 12:20:13 PM     comment on this entry []

© Copyright 2003 Andy Sennitt.