Media Insider: The new TVNZ+ app - TVNZ on when final bugs will be ironed out; announces Football World Cup price
TVNZ says it is resolving the remaining issues with its new-look app and promises football fans there will be no problems with upcoming World Cup coverage. It has today announced the price to watch the full tournament.
TVNZ has apologised to viewers still struggling with its new app and signalled that the last remaining major bugs should be exterminated by the end of next week.
It has also announced today a $44.95 all-tournament pass on the new app for the upcoming Football World Cup.
As of late last week, an estimated 3000 customers were still struggling with various issues in trying to access the new TVNZ+ app – on top of thousands of others left frustrated and angry in the previous week and a half.
On TVNZ’s Breakfast show this morning, co-host Tova O’Brien asked TVNZ head of sport Melodie Robinson what message she had for the “negative nellies” who had been “griping about some of the glitches”.
Robinson said she cared about the viewer experience, and while there had been “a couple of issues”, these would be sorted before the World Cup started.
Nevertheless, the terms and conditions of the new tournament pass show TVNZ is preparing contingencies - if it experiences any technical difficulties with matches, it may make the games free on TVNZ+ and/or its terrestrial channels.
Paid-up subscribers might also have advertising served up to them, say the terms and conditions.
An upbeat TVNZ chief digital officer Rob Hutchinson told Media Insider on Thursday last week that the number of TVNZ+ issues was “declining rapidly”, and that audiences were back to near normal levels.
He also reiterated that the “vast majority” of the now almost 800,000 people who had signed into the new app – the cornerstone of TVNZ’s five-year, near-$100 million digital strategy – had not encountered any issues at all.
He said the issues that TVNZ had been dealing with in the past two weeks were “pretty normal” in a project of this scale, and he expected viewing numbers and experiences to be “back to completely normal, probably within a week or two”.
“The team always knew we would have this stabilisation period and we would be shipping fixes.”
As Media Insider revealed 10 days ago, some viewers had taken to TVNZ’s Facebook page, other social media sites, chat forums and real life to variously describe the app upgrade as “disastrous”, a “disgrace”, a “nightmare”, “a total shambles” and an “absolute mess”.
Among myriad complaints, some customers said they had been left with blank (full-blue) screens, frozen-screen wheels of doom, low-quality pictures, lost watchlists of their favourite TV shows and the absence of closed captions.
Others said the app crashed frequently or didn’t open at all.
In a social media message last week, TVNZ said sorry.
“We’re aware of issues affecting some of our viewers. We apologise for any inconvenience. Our team is working through these as quickly as possible, and a number of solutions are in place already. Fixes will continue to roll out as work progresses. Thank you for your patience.”
Hutchinson told Media Insider on Thursday: “We know there are probably a few thousand people currently having problems, and we also know that the majority of them are on older televisions.
“Our full focus is on those older televisions now.”
He defended the way TVNZ had handled the problems and its communication with customers – some people have complained that it’s been impossible to speak with anyone, or that they haven’t heard back.
“We’ve just done one of the biggest, essentially change-outs of a very popular, always-being-used-every-hour-of-every-day platform,” Hutchinson said.
“That’s rarely been done in New Zealand and broadly speaking, it went well. In fact, it probably went better than we initially expected.”
He believed customer communication had been “absolutely appropriate for the small number of audience who have been impacted”.
“We’ve tried to communicate with them, particularly ... ‘We believe we’ve got a fix for you. Please try again.’ Often, that has just been plenty.
“Have we needed to do broader communications? There are hundreds of thousands of people every day watching without any problems. What would we be saying to them?”
Media Insider was still receiving emails last week from viewers having a broad range of problems. And since this article was first published at 5am on Monday, there has been a steady of flow of emails from still-angry customers.
“TVNZ’s responses have a level of bulls**t that Donald Trump would struggle to match,” wrote one customer.
In his interview with Media Insider, Hutchinson offered an explanation and hope to unhappy customers.
He said TVNZ+ was available on almost 100 different devices, which made this project a lot more sophisticated than, say, a news website overhaul.
“If you think of a classic news website, it’s the web, Android phones and iPhones.
“But for us, we actually have to account for the fact that Samsung 2016 [TVs] and Samsung 2019 are radically different from each other, let alone Samsung 2023 and 2025.
“So we’re now working through which of these older TVs our audiences are having some problems with and resolving those issues.
“Individual devices, particularly much older televisions, just require extra optimisation to get them working.”
Hutchinson defended the level of testing that TVNZ and its suppliers had done before the new app’s release. He said TVNZ had done a lot of testing on some 50 devices.
“The best way to put it is when hundreds of thousands of people show up, which they do every day, and they log in and start watching their content, issues can be seen for the first time that were invisible when 20 testing televisions were looking at the same content.
“The testing was of very high quality. It was across so many different devices of different years and different manufacturers.”
Are you still having issues and problems with the new TVNZ+ app? Please tell us your experience - email shayne.currie@nzme.co.nz
He said TVNZ was “seeing audiences pretty much back to where we would expect them to be” and there was no need for “make-good” arrangements with advertisers, or compensation conversations with suppliers or other parties.
Football World Cup
With the Football World Cup closing in rapidly – it starts on June 12 (NZT) – TVNZ needs to ensure its platform is as stable as possible.
The state broadcaster has the rights to the tournament, and the new app allows it to introduce pay-TV.
While TVNZ will screen 22 of the 104 games live and free, it will charge a $44.95 tournament fee for viewers who want access to live coverage of all 104 games.
“We’re completely on track with our Football World Cup coverage and with the technology supporting broadcasting it,” Hutchinson said. “Everything is tested. Everything is working.”
He said he was proud of the way TVNZ and its suppliers had rapidly resolved issues over the past two weeks, with hot fixes.
“The rate at which we’ve resolved issues and gotten the solution out there has been really, really fast.
“Our supplier is actually in country working with us and has done an incredible job at turning around fixes and resolving issues, often in minutes, not hours.
“One of the reasons the issues have been going down so rapidly is how good they are at turning around fixes in short periods of time.”
Have you tried turning it off and on?
For those people still having issues, Hutchinson said there could be a simple fix if they hadn’t already tried.
“The first thing I would say is turn off ... and restart the television.
“See if there’s an update to the TVNZ+ app. Install that. Make sure you’ve got your phone or your computer near you, because when you go to log in, you’re going to be sent a code.
“It’s really easy to type that code into the TV. It’s made it much easier for so many people.
“There is a high likelihood we’ve done an update for you.
“So please just try the classic – I’m giving you IT advice now, but turn off the television, restart it, update the TVNZ+ app and then type in the passcode.”
He said that with any technology, there would always be some underlying issues from time to time.
“Just to be clear, the old platform had issues – it had a standard error rate, as every streaming platform in the world does.
“But do we expect the vast majority of our audience to have a good experience?
“Yes, we do.”
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor and has a small shareholding in NZME.