Stratos Television will be crowned the only independent nationwide TV station in the country when it starts broadcasting free-to-air on Freeview’s digital terrestrial television (DTT) platform next year.

Viewers, from March 1, 2011, will be able to view the broadcaster’s programmes without needing to have a satellite dish.

A Freeview digital receiver will still be needed, but newer model TVs already have that built in.

Around 20 staff will be made redundant following MediaWorks axing of TV3 shows Sunrise and ASB Business this morning.

Asked whether Sunrise presenters Oliver Driver and Carly Flynn would be redeployed to other shows, MediaWorks Executive Director of TV Ian Audsley said he had talked to each about “possible other roles across across MediaWorks networks” (the media company also owns a string of radio stations including RadioLive, The Edge, The Rock and More FM).

Live TV coverage of the Napier police shooting drama last Friday pushed TV One’s midday news to its highest-ever rating.

Figures supplied by TVNZ say viewer numbers for all aged five and above was 156,230. The previous biggest viewing numbers were just under 140,000. By comparison, TV3’s midday news attracted 32,870 viewers.

TV One’s 6 o’clock news topped 700,000, well above TV3’s 452,650. These figures were also well above the previous Friday’s viewership of 550,000 and 341,000 respectively.

Latest data from the World Internet Project finds New Zealand is number one in education, in the middle of the pack for abandoning broadcast TV, and second-to-bottom in broadband penetration.

The project, backed locally by AUT University, the National Library and InternetNZ, employed a private research organisation to interview 1430 New Zealanders on their internet grazing habits, which were then compared against respondents from 29 other countries.

The latest in a string of Japanese techs to deliver a miserable quarter, Pioneer has announced 10,000 lay-offs and its exit from the TV business from March 2010.

Pioneer’s flatscreen TVs are distributed in New Zealand by North Shore, Auckland-based Monaco.

Three makers of LCD flat panels have plead guilty to US Department of Justice charges of price fixing, and agreed to pay total of $US585 million ($NZ991 million) in fines.

Japan's Sharp, Korea's LG and Taiwan''s Chungwha filed their guilty plea in a San Francisco federal court today.

The three manufacturers admitted to a conspiracy to fix the price of certain twisted film transfer (TFT) panels between 2001 and 2006.