A software upgrade was responsible for a glitch in Sky Television which left viewers unable to change channels yesterday.
Sky spokesman Tony O'Brien said he couldn't say how many viewers were caught up in the breakdown, but said subscribers with set top box digital decoders had been affected.
"It's absolutely impossible to tell how many - we just don't know."
Sky had 760,000 subscribers and the majority of those used digital decoders, he said.
Mr O'Brien said fixing the problem was simple. Viewers needed to simply unplug the decoder from its power source, wait 10 seconds and then reconnect - "like rebooting a computer".
The technological changes that caused the problem were being made to accommodate the new high definition TVNZ channels but Mr O'Brien emphasised the problem had nothing to do with TVNZ.
"We apologise for any inconvenience that our viewers may have suffered but we're very pleased that it's something that we can fix very easily."
Sky had customer service operators available for support by telephone and had received an unknown number of phonecalls from viewers about the issue, Mr O'Brien said.
A message on the network's website also advised viewers how to reset their decoders.
Sky glitch prevents viewers changing channel
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