Hawaii iPTV pau (Honolulu, Hana: how much, closing, living)

[HonuMan]

Did any of you Hawaii-lovers living on the mainland subscribe to Hawaii iPTV? My wife and I found out about it in an ad in Hana Hou! magazine. You accessed it over broadband Internet either via computer or a box made by a company called NeuLion. It offered live TV from the three main Honolulu channels, as well as a huge library of on-demand programming going back as far as the late 1970s. Last month, they announced they were shutting down on July 1, so I spent many hours burning shows to DVD. There was no explanation as to why they were shutting down, but I suspect too few people were subscribing in this bad economy. My wife is Hawaiian, and I'm a mainland keiki kama'aina. There were some wonderful music and cultural shows, and I learned quite a bit. Perhaps my favorite was the collection of skits from Booga Booga, a comedy group from the 1980s that is what the original cast of Saturday Night Live might have been like if they'd been born in Hawaii. I was laughing hysterically throughout -- and I realized how much I've learned about Hawaiian culture and pidgin in the 9 years since I met my wife. Booga Booga would been utterly incomprehensible to me before. Anway, we're sad that Hawaii iPTV is no more.

[sksmich]

Aloha!
Yes! I subscribed to Hawaii-IPTV in May07. As a past resident and somewhat frequent vacationer,
I thoroughly enjoyed watching the music, comedy and cultural programs. My main treat? I had watched the KGMB 10pm news, every morning, on demand, for two years. Being able to take the box virtually anywhere there was a wireless connection and connect it to a TV source was awesome! I had just renewed via phone only a few weeks before they made the announcement.
I'm sure the economy had a lot to do with their decision, as you surmised. Having used both the box and the Web Console, the box was nearly flawless. However, the Web Console was constantly in need of updating of the Live and Archived programming. Had I been just a subscriber to the Web Console, I would have been less than a happy person. The staff was extremely helpful and would always reply to the "help" emails within the next day and get the problems taken care of. (Mahalo Patty!) I'm curious as to the minimum subscriptions that were necessary to keep it going. They had announced, as late as January, the renewal of some of the programming and this would have been the second year of the K5 UofH Athletics contract. Although the first few Warrior football games, broadcast over IPTV were poor or nonexistent in sound, the quality of the remainder of the games was very good. It was also a treat to see the Wahine vollyball and Warrior baseball games.
Man, do I miss IPTV! Maybe if the economy turns around.........
As they signed their closing letter, Ahui ho (Until we meet again), I can only hope.

[HonuMan]

We put our box in a closet in the hope that Hawaii iPTV will one day rise again. I don't know whether the box has any resale value -- I checked NeuLion's site, and they offer a handful of other subscription channels, none of which I find compelling enough to pay for, so it's probably a limited-demand item.

It's sad knowing that all the program content is sitting on a server somewhere, inaccessible to anyone. I confess that, after I received the going-out-of-business announcement, I spent many hours feeding discs to our DVD recorder so we can watch shows at a later date.

[thesycophant]

I wish I'd known about this at the time! Hopefully it rises again.