SKY Television - New Zealand's First 'All Digital' Broadcaster

SKY Television’s analogue UHF pay TV network will shut down at midnight tonight which means that SKY will become New Zealand’s first “all digital” TV broadcaster.

The early switchover to digital will now give all our pay TV customers the choice of more than 110 channels, movies and sport in HDTV plus On Demand movies and events through MY SKY HDi and interactive services including electronic programming guide, the Weather Channel, pay-per-view and games.

Over the last six months, through a series of campaigns across the country, we have been successful in encouraging the more than 25,000 remaining analogue subscribers to transition to SKY’s digital satellite service.

Martin Wrigley, SKY Director of Operations said “SKY’s analogue UHF service has been in operation since SKY launched in 1990 – a number of the UHF transmitters are almost 20 years of age and nearing the end of their life expectancy”.

“We decided to close down the analogue UHF network, which will result in SKY becoming an ‘all-digital’ broadcaster” said Mr Wrigley.

Please note: PRIME will not be affected by this analogue switch off – it will continue to be available to New Zealand viewers on four broadcast platforms: analogue terrestrial with 91.3% coverage; SKY Digital with 100% coverage; Freeview terrestrial with 75% coverage and Freeview satellite with 100% coverage.

PS: The Compaq 386 computers controlling the conditional access system were originally purchased for $22,000 each back in 1990 – after 20 years we have the honour of being the oldest NDS CA system still operating anywhere in the world. In fact the only way to keep them going through the year 2000 and up to today was to keep winding back the PC’s internal time clock every year!

We plan to put this “museum piece” on displace in the near future.