KEY POINTS:
Congratulations to Peter Dengate Thrush - the Wellington lawyer who is the new chairman of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. He has big shoes to fill following high-profile internet guru Vint Cerf into the role.
There hasn't been much analysis of the decision around the web, though there are a few interesting entries on this Slashdot thread.
The question has to now be asked - what can he do for New Zealand in this role? Well, lets allow him to get his feet under the desk but it has to be good for Internet NZ in terms of getting access to ICANN and to a knowledgebase of internet expertise.
As I wrote in this blog last week, Dengate Thrush has a lot of big issues to deal with, not least of which is the move to IPv6. Good luck to Peter, he deserves the chairmanship.
Cerf said of the appointment: "ICANN has moved from a foundation state to a steady state. Peter understands that and the Board's role and is a great choice to keep the organisation strong and focused".
Back home it appears Telecom had an outage that disrupted service for thousands of internet users over the weekend. According to Mike Cranna of internet monitoring company Epitiro: "Something happened in Mayoral Drive on Sunday morning, and it took Xtra and ihugs' service down for about four hours between 5:30am and 9:30am".
He added: "The word on the street is they suffered a major power outage to a couple of levels at the Mayoral Drive exchange, and our data shows services were affected for the two ISPs all over the country". Was your internet access affected over the weekend?
Rod Drury isn't impressed with the fact that Freeview isn't available on Sky TV's platform. I see his point - why invest in a box to show satellite content when there's already one available in the form of the Sky decoder, which hundreds of thousands of homes already have?
But it would seem to me that Freeview is aimed at the growing band of people who are disillusioned with pay TV and want to have a free service with good reception.
Why should TVNZ or any of the other Freeview broadcasters make it more attractive for people to sign up to Sky or keep their subscriptions when they're trying to provide an alternative? Sky is doing exactly the same thing in keeping Prime off the Freeview platform. If Freeview had Prime and a 24 hour news channel I'm convinced take up would surge.
I actually quite like the Freeview user interface, but the Freeview hardware is second-rate. Hopefully integrated digital tuners will become widely available next year so at least new TV buyers will avoid having to shell out for an overpriced receiver.
In terms of TVNZ's relationship with Sky, I'm told the rights, which allow TVNZ's channels to be rebroadcast on Sky, are coming up for renewal in the next couple of years.
Obviously it is in TVNZ's interests to keep its channels going out on Sky, but there's a bit of leverage available to them in being able to hold them back.
Imagine that - Sky subscribers lose One and TV2, which are still available to free-to-air analogue and digital viewers. That could change the landscape of the TV industry. There will be some serious negotiating going on between the broadcasters over content rights in the near future.
