If you’ve used eTV recently, you will have noticed this start-up message:

“Attention: eTV is currently in the transition to a new recording system. Due to this our International Channels are temporarily unavailable to record from. There may also be delays with shows coming onto site after their broadcast date. Please bear with us – we will resume normal service soon!”

This effectively seems to mean that, while older programmes are still there and watchable, very little that’s new has been recorded for the last month or two or even longer – despite the fact that new documentaries are airing every day on the international and national channels accessible via eTV.

Last week I asked Gresham Bradley, eTV Manager, how long it would be before normal service resumes, and he replied:

“We have just been able to start clearing the backlog of recorded programmes from the prolonged switchover of our recording hardware all in the past month. It was supposed to be a one week process but that did not happen as you can see. You should see a heap of November recordings come online in the next week. For example over 200 programmes were encoded in just the past 2 days through our new encoding server which is incredibly powerful. So, sorry about the delays but you will see MUCH higher quality in the videos from now on and a faster response online as well.”

As yet I haven’t detected any improvement, but I expect it will be working properly again by early next year, hopefully sooner.

Max