2012: The End of TVNZ7
June 30, 2022
By AHNZ
Today in television history, 30 June, 2012, the plug was pulled on TVNZ7. There were protests that this educational and informative digital channel would be pulled since it was one of the main lures to entice viewers to accept Freeview.
I don’t think viewers could articulate quite why TVNZ7 (2008-12) was important to them. My answer is that television once had generations of branding telling us they were our friend forever, part of the family. When digital TV came we were promised anew that the relationship would still hold true and that there would be more ‘family’ and ‘world’ to see on screen. This social contract was broken after consumers had paid their money and upgraded their equipment because the vanguard of ‘many’ new ‘exciting’ shows were subsequently not expanded upon but actually retracted.
Another explanation is that New Zealand was in the midst of a Dignity Culture period in our Moral Cultures history cycle. Prior to the Millennial Victimhood Culture era we have recently lived through New Zealand experienced several years of high-intellect and high-culture self-image. We were sophisticated, technological, productive. We had John Key’s National 5.0 Government, we watched TED Talks and the all-white high-British drama Downton Abbey was highly popular entertainment. We read books with sophisticated new takes on the world written by people like Malcolm Gladwell, Stephens’ Dubner and Levitt, and Hans Herman Hoppe. TVNZ7 was delivering programs for the elite grey matter Kiwis while the sun shone on them. When their time was over their favorite TV service pulled away.
If Pio Terei were given an OBE for delivering us Freeview then he must have considered pulling a Mike King and giving it back in disgust for having been part of a sham. He had helped trick a nation into giving up media it loved with the eventual agenda of cutting off supply completely.
Interestingly, TV2 itself started up today in history too. It buildt the brand of being connected to viewers that digital TV severed. TVNZ7 was the main Judas Goat in the great severing.
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