YouTube just announced with a blog post, that they are bringing loads or new original content via new YouTube channels. The new channels will be created by well-known personalities and content producers as well as some of the most innovative up-and-coming media companies and some of YouTube’s own existing partners.

The first of these new original channels will appear on YouTube starting next month and continuing over the next year. They’ll be available on any internet-connected device, with all the normal interactivity and social features of YouTube built right in.

While no details of financial arrangements between YouTube and content creators has been detailed, Google do reference their partner grants program announced in July. So is this the IPTV platform to challenge traditional over-the-air broadcast and Pay TV services ? For more information and to sign-up for updates, head to http://www.youtube.com/creators/original-channels.html

Normally more free TV channels is a good thing, we have recently been through an explosion of new channels, so one more is a good thing right ? Well the reason the other new channels like 7Mate, Go, GEM and One have been a welcome addition to the Freeview OTA lineup, is because the programming has been interesting.

While no channel can keep everybody in a diverse audience happy 100% of the time, generally we can find channels that regularly program shows we enjoy. While the newest Freeview channel – Television 4, is marketed as 4me, covering categories of Shopping, Education, Finance and Lifestlye, essentially it’s a channel loaded with infomercials.

Television 4, or digital channel 64 launched to all homes in Regional NSW, VIC, ACT and the Gold Coast. Those of you in the cities, don’t stress, your really not missing much. Coming up this afternoon is Brand Developers, Surfing Aus, Commsec Entrepeneurs, Danoz and Brand Developers again. Not exactly a stunning lineup for launch day.

Update
Despite the channel now being live for over a week, Television 4 still doesn’t have guide data, meaning that there is no way to set DVRs to record shows.

More info on Television 4 at Brand New Media.

Since the start of February 2011, I’ve been unable to get the GO! channel and guide data for GEM had stopped updating. As TiVo is my set-top-box / PVR, I turned to TiVo support for assistance on the issue and emailed them on February 18th. Strangely not everyone in the area experienced the issue. Fast forward 2 weeks and finally a response from TiVo arrives in the inbox.

Hi Jason,

Apologies for the long delay, we have been investigating this issue since 4 February. Channel 9 has doubled up on triplets in your region and this has caused this cross-wiring and loss of EPG data. Channel 9 acknowledged the issue on 16 Feb and have promised to implement a fix tomorrow morning. The data should be available on the TiVo as of this Friday.
I am very sorry for the long delay in the fix, it was a struggle to get Channel 9 to even believe there was an issue in the first place. Thank you for your patience.

For any future enquiries related to this issue please reply to this message leaving the reference number in the subject.
Regards,

Hybrid TV Level 3 Support

WIN are trying to market this as an ‘upgrade’ but in reality the required re-scanning is just a fix for this issue. Affected channels include WIN, GO! and GEM.

You can check out WIN’s Rescanning guide PDF for details of how to perform the ‘upgrade’ for your TV/STB.

More @ TV Tonight

Behind the scenes for filming 9 News

This is a great video showing you what it is like in the control room, on the news floor, and in remote locations when recording the 9 news.

You can also watch part 2 here.

GTV 9 Melbourne

Behind the scenes of the soon to be demolished GTV 9 studio.

Control Room for Hotseat

This is a brief tour behind the scenes of HotSeat and in the control, and audio room.

24 Hours in TCN 9 Studio 1

A wonderful 24 hour view of life in a studio.

Before the show of Weekend Today

A brief summary of what the morning before Weekend Today is like.

Behind the scenes of TCN 9 Studio 2

This studio is for shows such as the Footy Show and Funniest Home Video’s.

About the Teleprompter and Control Room in QTQ 9 Brisbane

Ever wondered how the teleprompter or Autocue works? This video shows you how.

Behind the scenes of Studio 9 and Hey Hey It’s Saturday

What to know what the scenese look like behind Hey Hey It’s Saturday?

Channel 9’s Basement

It’s amazing how much old things they have stored away.

The Props at Channel 9

Go for a walkthrough of some of the props that have been used at Channel 9

The Set of Channel 9 News

This is a video of the studio of channel 9 news. It also explains the giant seagull appearance, and the “Gold Room”.

Tour of Studio 1 in Richmond

A tour of Studio 1 and the stage for ACA.

I would just like to thank Channel 9 for creating all these wonderful video’s of what it is like behind the scenes on television. You can watch more video’s from Channel 9 by visiting their YouTube Channel.

Digital Trends has a great post about a brand new hardware device from D-Link. While we seen a dedicated hardware set-top box with a cute-angled design from D-link in late 2010, D-Link aren’t stopping there. The Iomega TV set-top box has one significant difference – local store. Available in 1 or 2TB versions, the price is likely to be more expensive than Boxee Box, but both run the same Boxee software.

Another similarity is the remote with qwerty keyboard on the back. One advantage of coming second is that you can improve on what came before you. The front of the remote at first glance is more complex, but any boxee box user will see it as better functionality. The inclusion of a dedicated Home button is a big deal, something really missing from Boxee Box, at times you can be 4-5 levels deep with the only option available being the back button.

While the Iomega TV box is certainly not as sexy, unique or conversational as the Boxee Box, Iomega focus more on function, rather than form. It’s expected the latest Boxee-running set-top box will start at a recommended price of US$229.99, but that’s with no storage. Expect an the 1 and 2TB versions to be priced at $299.99 and $349.99 respectively.

Its expected the device will go on sale in the US in February, lets hope for Boxee fans that’s an international launch so there’s some competition in the market. Oh an by the way.. a ‘feature’ of the Iomega is that it will stack on top of your existing home entertainment gear.

Like most announcements this week, expect more detail to be released as CES officially starts, later this week.

Image source: Ubergizmo.com

Update
Ubergizmo has all the specs on the device, head over there now to get the details.

More @ Digital Trends

Samsung have just released press shots of these new ‘light’ weight’ 3D glasses. On a new Japanese website samsungtomorrow.com they claim the glasses are the lightest ever 3D glasses. Thanks to the magic of Bing Translator, English speaking individuals can read the news as well.

Made by luxury glasses manufacturer Sihouete and weighing in at just 28 grams, they are really light, well done. The problem is, the weight of the glasses has nothing to do with the reason people aren’t lining up in droves for 3DTVs. Even the most enthusiastic 3D supported has to admit all of the glasses (these included) are ugly. Can someone please get Oakley on the phone ? Its unlikely that you’ll ever look cool wearing glasses inside, but there’s a long way to go before you don’t look like a tool.

There’s even a 50/50 weight distribution to avoid pressure on your nose. Samsung, you really have pulled out all the stops here. The Samsung 3D glasses do have one redeeming feature, the ability to auto-detect wether your wearing them and automatically power them on or off. This conserves battery life, that’s right, get used to charging your glasses.

Samsung may not be the only ones with 3D glasses announcements this week, with CES 2011 about to get underway. 3DTV is sure to be, yet again, a big theme of the show.

Via Gizmodo

This Christmas I bought my parents a TV from Kogan. For those of you unfamiliar with the brand, Kogan is the Australian online-only, manufacturer direct to consumer, cost saving, new kid on the block in the electronics market. In terms of TVs, they approach existing manufacturers in China making sets for big name companies like Samsung and order some with Kogan branding.

Shipping direct to consumers cuts out 2 arms of the chain – wholesaler and retailer, which both add their margins on, making the overall cost higher. In consumers electronics, brands often play the race to the bottom on prices, Kogans’ approach allows them to create good quality products while delivering really low prices.

Gallery

Design
The set looks pretty nice, actually better than it does in press shots (above). The glossy piano black finish surrounds the 40” screen and while the bezel is thick (around 1.5”), I actually like that, having black surround the display makes the colours pop. The speaker below the screen is actually quite decent and actually very loud. Most of the time the volume has been set at 5, in a quiet environment, even the lowest setting – 1 is loud enough. The volume scale is out of 100, but don’t try it on max unless you feel like bleeding from your ears.

Quality
The video quality of the Kogan is actually quite impressive. While I don’t think its the best 1080p video I’ve seen, its certainly very good. There’s the occasional compression artefact, fast paced movement never blurred, likely thanks to that 100Hz refresh rate. Colours looked great, although I’d recommend the mild setting for the best black levels. 

Setup
Given this TV was for my parents, setup needed to be simply, and it was. Connect up the antenna, power and switch it on. As with most TVs these days, the auto-setup wizard takes you through tunning automatically, so naturally that’s a breeze. For some reason we’re still shipping analogue tuners in TVs today, so just skip past that. Once it complete, your all set, ready to watch over the air, high definitely Freeview.  

Connectivity
All your standard connections are included on this TV – 2xHDMI, VGA, USB, 2x Component, 2xAV. The annoying part is that none of these connections are available on the side. This means you’ve got two choices when connecting devices. The first is to pull your TV out from the unit while awkwardly plugging in each device – not a good solution. The second is to connect extension cables that can be accessed more easily. Ultimately the seemingly simply task of viewing pictures on a USB thumb drive becomes a real hassle.

OSD
The on-screen display for Kogan is quite simple, but clean and decent quality. One of my frustrations with some OSD is that despite being a HD set, they can look terrible. Kogan does a good job, using a up, down, left, right control scheme with a rotating circular menu. Importantly its easy to use and while your configuration options aren’t exactly a lengthy list, the standard options are there.

Buying a TV online
This is the first product I’ve bought from Kogan and after going through the experience and using the device, I’d definitely be comfortable in doing it in the future. After buying the TV online on Sunday, on Tuesday afternoon it arrived. The scary part of making a TV purchase online, or anything of significant value online is clearly the fear that your buying something you haven’t seen or touched. We’re so programmed by years of buying products in-store that its actually requires quite a mental shift to allow yourself overcome that initial emotion and fear.

In reality, when you break down what your actually looking at in-store, your very rarely seeing the experience that you’ll get in your house. First of all, in-store lighting is completely different to the lighting in your house. Second of all, TVs in-store are configured in a way that has all the brightness, colour and pretty much everything else cranked to high. In reality, this is not how your TV will run at home.

Remote
Some remotes are amazingly terrible to use, so bad that it seems nobody actually used it before it shipped. Fortunately Kogan’s remote doesn’t fall into that category. The remote has a good feel in the hand, comfortable access to the most commonly used features of volume, channels and source input. The only downside is the EPG is buried in the tiny buttons at the bottom of the remote. Given that guide is a button used everyday, it should have more prevalence. Batteries are included.

Manual
Something to be aware of is that Kogan does not ship any manual or warranty information with the device. There’s actually no documentation or paper at all, shocking hey. Welcome to the future people, the days of distributing this content in dead tree format is going away. While some products scale back on the amount included and point to online for more information, Kogan are going the whole way. Kogan Manuals are available from http://www.kogan.com.au/manuals.

Overall
As I mentioned at the start, I’m actually really happy with the Kogan 40” 100Hz TV, with the lack of side inputs being the biggest complaint. If you can deal with that, you definitely should consider Kogan when making your next TV purchase. At $649, the TV is great value for money for those who are budget conscious.

More info @ Kogan

The Freeview commercial station wars are heating up with even more channels set to launch. Recently Australians have seen the introduction of 7TWO, Go! and OneHD, now there’s set to be two more channels added to the free-to-air line-up.

Channel 7 have announced they will launch a new male-orientated channel called 7mate. This actually sounds pretty good as a concept, it could be the channel you throw on when you have mates over. Entertaining, comedy / action content sure to make you the perfect host, avoiding those embarrassing moments when Desperate Housewives shows up on your manly HDTV.

7mate will broadcast in HD and is set to launch in just over a month – September 25th. The first program broadcast will be the AFL Grand Final which from memory hasn’t ever been broadcast in HD before.. A great step forward.

Channel Nine are trying to trump channel 7 by launching their new channel a few days before 7mate. While details are still light-on at this point, it’s believe Nine’s new channel will be called GEM. TV Tonight say “Rumours on Nine’s channel extend from a crime channel, lifestyle channel or a female-skewed channel possibly called GEM.”

Ultimately all this competition is great for Aussie consumers, getting more free-to-air content than ever before.

More @ TVTonight

Earlier this year we heard about the ABC’s very ambitious plans to create Australia’s first 24 hour news channel. The wait is almost over. Today the channel went live, however before the channel’s official release next week, Channel 24 is currently looping a preview reel of what to expect.

Channel 24 will contain news reports from around the world, with live reporters on the ground when the action happens. It will be interesting to see how commercial stations react to Channel 24, in the past major events seen all stations attempt live coverage, but often falling pretty short. After Channel 24 officially launches, I’ll know there’s 2 places for the latest info that I’ll turn too… Twiiter and Channel 24.

Sadly a consequence of this awesomeness is the removal of ABC HD, this is related to our ridiculous restrictions on the number of free-to-air licences available. We seen this same issue when Ten launched One HD and TenHD disappeared, frankly it is insane. We all spend thousands on high definition televisions and want to see more content in high quality.

Today is a landmark day in Australia with the first switch off of analogue TV broadcast. When the digital TV transition was first announced, the Federal Government created a website http://www.digitalready.gov.au to explain the transition and provide information on upcoming transition areas.

On 30 June 2010, Mildura Sunraysia became the first region in the country to switch to digital TV. If you live in the region and have not yet made the switch then don’t worry, it’s not too late.

The wireless spectrum that Analogue TV runs on is incredibly valuable and has attracted very strong interest from mobile network providers. Some of its biggest benefits is that it can transmit large distances with good penetration through most types of walls. This means fewer mobile towers would be required to deliver next generation 4G networks and at a lower cost than existing 3G networks.

I don’t need to point out the benefits of Digital over Analogue because your all watching digital TVs already.. aren’t you ? If you’ve purchased a TV in the past 3-4 years chances are your already set. If your parents or grandparents are super nostalgic and refuse to release their death grip on that old tube TV, get them a sub-$100 set-top-box. If you need additional help, email switchover@dbcde.gov.au.

So while Mildura has lead the way in the digital transition, by the end of 2013 analogue TV will be shut off 2013. At this point your likely wondering which region is next ? In what seems like the ultimate game of throwing darts at a wall, it turns out Regional SA and Broken hill area are next in line on December 15, 2010.

For a full timetable of switchover dates (or to check your area), check out this Digital TV transition timetable.