NZ on Screen launched this week. Thankfully they made sure to have a high quality and low bandwidth modes, which is choice considering how  many kiwis are still on dial up.

 Amusingly, the first I heard of it was a bunch of teen girls chatting about it on the bus. Go viral marketing! 

 Obviously, the site is in its infancy, and hopefully we’ll get more than just the slim excerpts of series and shows than what is currently up there. I for one have heard really good things about Mcphail and Gadsby and would really liked to have watched more than just an episode to know what the fuss was about.  What interested me was how Skitz hasn’t made an appearance yet; considering that the Gibson Group is all over the place (one of the first people interviewed is even Dave Gibson) and Jemaine Clement and Rhys Darby are part of the Conchords phenomena, it could have been a boost to the initial campaign. 

Strangely there is also a lack of Havoc and Newsboy, Jeremy Wells (Newboy) gets a lot of love with having Eating Media Lunch, The Unauthorised History of New Zealand, and his Intrepid Journey to Libya shown. Maybe they just got Wellsed out and something had to go? Maybe Mr. Havoc threw up in some ones bathroom? I dunno.  Speaking of noticeably missing content, I do feel a strange relief that they haven’t many historic stinkers for the opening gambit; I smell no whiff of Melody Rules, to use the ur example.

The other really part of the site is the awesome sounding Screen Talk, which currently is very small and much of the content is stuff that the average person won’t find that interesting. Things like production biographies for example. Thankfully, I’m not the average person and quite enjoyed poking around. I noticed that the Creative Commons was also utilised with Screen Talk. I love the Creative Commons, so am really chuffed to see that some of this is being used. A history of a program with a little criticism attached to it is a fantastic way to generate a useful piece of creative cultural capital. I hope that users or atleast, a variety of different critics are allowed to access and generate this content with the site. 

It’s a good start, and I’m hoping to see more good things from them shortly.  Because, they just seem to be more onto it than the group who desided to make TVNZ’s website keyword centric. Yeah.

UPDATE: Brenda from NZONSCREEN is my hero for being so hard hitting about the flash facts.