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After months of promotion, Australia's Ten network has finally launched their new high-definition multichannel, named Ten-HD. The station promises up to 50-hours of different content to the regular, standard definition Ten service, although most of this will be outside peak viewing hours. The Channel Ten evening news, broadcast at 5pm for many years now, will be repeated half an hour later on the high-definition channel, and already a number of low-rating programs have been moved off the SD channel onto the HD service.

Unfortunately, there isn't much prime-time multichannelling, and most printed television guides haven't yet listed the new station, so it remains to be seen whether it will gather much of an audience.

This is the second HD multichannel service to start operation in Australia; back in October, the Seven network commenced separate programming on their 7-HD channel.

This leaves the Nine network as the only metropolitan commercial network without a multichannel service, although they have claimed it will begin in 2008.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's local station in Darwin, 105.7 ABC Darwin, is now streaming online meaning that now, local ABC stations in all state and territory capital cities are available via the internet.

ABC Darwin carries many of the programs broadcast on VL8A, VL8K and VL8T, Australia's only remaining domestic shortwave transmitters.

There's not all that many regional Australian radio stations streaming their programs on the internet, but as of this week, there's one more: 3GV, broadcasting from Sale in eastern Victoria, on 1242 kHz.

However, the station will only exist with this name for one more day; according to The Spy Report, the station will be relaunched on Friday November 30th, 2007, at midday, with a new name of Gold 1242, playing oldies.

The station's stream is here.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation will launch its third domestic television station, ABC3, in April 2008, if government funding goes ahead. Australia is currently in the middle of a federal election, and the governing conservative coalition has promised $80 million to the ABC for the station, dedicated towards commercial-free children's programming, if re-elected.

The ABC currently broadcasts two domestic channels, ABC-TV (analog and digital) and ABC2 (digital only). ABC2 currently carries a large amount of childrens programming during daylight hours, and it is unknown if this programming will continue after the launch of the new channel.

All India Radio, India's public broadcaster, has a novel on-demand service: users can select one of a number of songs from a list, dial a number on their phone and then enter a code. The song selected will then be queued to be played over a transmitter in Chennai, Kolkata or Mumbai, during selected times.

Australia's Seven network has got the jump on the other commercial stations by commencing separate programming on their high-definition stream, named 7HD. Programs start at 10.30pm on weeknights and all day on weekends, and currently run without any advertising.

The station plans to show first-run movies on weeknights, and children's and family programming on weekends.

It is expected that a full launch of the station will happen in a few weeks' time.

Press release.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's local station in Canberra, 666 ABC Canberra is now streaming its programs online, after testing on and off for the past couple of months. The stream is available here.

Welcome to the first in a new series of articles looking at the radio stations available on the net from various regions around the world. For the next few weeks, we will be looking at radio stations in Germany, starting with this week with northern Germany, covering the states of Schleswig-Holstein, Niedersachsen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and the city states of Hamburg and Bremen.

Continue reading "Radio in Depth: Northern Germany"

We've all seen plenty of AM crystal radios before, but how many of us have seen one that does FM? Solomons Music have a couple of designs.

Now, if only someone could design a crystal DAB or DRM set


Link: via Make

Since the beginning of 2007, commercial TV stations in Australia have been allowed to carry separate programming on their high-definition channel, but until now, none of them have made use of this to any great extent.

That will change in December, when the Ten Network launches significant departures from their regular programming, on the HD stream.

Billed as a new commercial free-to-air station, Ten HD will carry 50 hours of programs not seen on the main channel, and 10 hours of timeshifted programs, including the 5pm news.

This is likely to spur a greater uptake of digital TV in Australia, as until now, the only new stations on digital available to most of Australia have been the ABC's ABC2 station, which carries mostly timeshifted material, and SBS's foreign language news service. In the regioons that gained genuinely new stations, such as Tasmania and Mildura, the uptake of digital television was much greater than in metropolitan areas.

Ten's choice of "Ten HD" as the name for their new station may prove confusing to viewers, however. In most other countries where one company operates multiple stations, the stations have clearly separate names and identities.

When digital radio is introduced to Australia in 2009, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation might double the number of networks it broadcasts, according to a report in today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Presumably the new networks would include the currently internet-only stations DiG, DiG Jazz and DiG Country.

Last month, Ireland's national broadcaster RTE opened up four new digital radio stations, using DAB: RTE 2XM, specialising in new music, aimed at the youth market; RTE Digital Radio News, a 24h news bulletin station; RTE Gold, playing music from the 50s, 60s and 70s; and RTE Junior, targetted at children.

There were no internet streams available for the stations on RTE's website, so I contacted RTE to find out if there were plans for this in the future; RTE's response was: "Longterm yes. However, at the moment it's only at trial stage.".

Hobart commercial radio stations Sea FM and Heart 107.3 are now streaming their programs on the internet. The quality of the streams isn't great, but it certainly is listenable. With last week's news of a new stream from ABC Hobart, these new streams mean that 70% of the radio stations available in Hobart are now accessible from the internet.

Links:

• Sea FM Hobart stream


• Heart 107.3 Hobart stream

via "Radio Expert" of aus.radio.broadcast

A few weeks ago we reported that DW-TV had appeared on Intelsat 8. Now, as rapidly as it appeared, it has now gone. This leaves Asiasat 3S as the only satellite through which DW-TV can be received in Australia and New Zealand.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has launched a number of new internet audio streams for some of their local stations. In addition to the existing streams for ABC Melbourne, ABC Sydney and Coast FM on the Gold Coast, there are now streams for ABC Adelaide, ABC Perth, ABC Hobart and ABC Newcastle.


Links to the stream can be found at the ABC's Backyard Audio page.