Freeview's marketing campaign began on 23 April 2007 through a website and through four television advertisements shown on Freeview's shareholders' TV channels, using the slogan "Make bad reception a thing of the past", and showing people using proverbial substitutes for rabbit ears for receiving TV reception.

It was announced the satellite service (up-linked from the Avalon studios in Lower Hutt), would have up to 18 channels available, with six each assigned to TVNZ and Mediaworks frequencies, and the balance to other networks.

The service initially operated only from Kordia sites for areas surrounding Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Napier-Hastings, Palmerston North, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin.

[7][8] As of 29 October 2014, live channels include NHK World, Arirang TV, MBC, Yonhap, MBN, HiTV+ and BTN.

[10] For all certified NZ Freeview (also all Australian "Freeview EPG" branded) receivers to activate the MHEG-5 EPG, the receiver must remap the remote control's guide button to be an extended function key for use by MHEG-5 applications which are normally limited to the four coloured buttons for launching functions.

During the third week of December 2014, TVNZ tested using the same Huffman look-up tables the BBC implemented to force viewers to use approved Freeview receivers that restrict HD recording and viewing.

DVB Transmission and Original (content) Network ID for the Igloo terrestrial service is 11008 and registered to Sky.

The TVNZ Sport Extra channel 20 was temporarily provided for the 2008 Olympics, the space on DVB-S was later used by a regional version of TV One.

TVNZ 6 and 7 were discontinued due to the government-provided funding coming to an end and were respectively, replaced by U and an hour delay of TV One.

Trackside became a pay TV-only channel on 14 April 2014 as a measure to raise more revenue for increased services for New Zealand Racing Board customers.

In addition, Oamaru (population 14,350) has limited terrestrial service through local station 45 South TV, while coverage of Cambridge (population 22,500) is intermittent as hills partially block the signal from Te Aroha transmitter and Hamilton Towers transmitter is not powerful enough (63 watts) to reach the town.

Freeview uses the DVB-T ODFM standard for terrestrial transmission, as established in 2001 with NZS6610:2001, to avoid the multipath problem caused by New Zealand's rugged topography.

[15] Terrestrial Freeview is broadcast in H.264, which unlike H.262 has an expensive transmission patent licensing tax for free TV and subscription use.

Currently the government owned TVNZ and Kordia which operate the H.264 re-compression multiplexers are failing to fully meet the in Good Standing payments to be included in the licensees listing.

MHEG-5 support is built by the UK's Strategy and Technology who provided the similar applications for the BBC's Red Button and terrestrial internet streaming platform.

Freeview cannot easily move to H.264 video broadcasting in the future as the encoding is unsupported by a large number of the receivers in the Freeview Satellite install base, also the additional patent licensing tax would make the satellite service even more expensive for channel operators.

Freeview had discussed with Telecom about the provision of IPTV over ADSL until it was shelved due to bandwidth and availability limitations.

[2] Freeview certification centres the localisation of multimedia data, primarily for the electronic programming guide (EPG).

Full fast forward and rewind cuing is available while an automatic ad skip function is not allowed.

An uncertified terrestrial DVR would have to know the specific files to extract from the DSM-CC stream to support a full EPG.

Freeview certification requires set-top boxes to disallow high definition video output over connections that do not support HDCP.

In practice this means nearly all HD CRT televisions sold in New Zealand and many early flat screen televisions can only receive high definition from an uncertified set-top box, which can output high definition over HDCP-free connections like component cables or on HDMI without HDCP.

Kordia and Johnson Dick and Associates (JDA) maintain a terrestrial network[17] of 64-QAM and 256-QAM capable transmitters around New Zealand.

Canterbury TV estimates it will need to pay NZ$1 million a year if it joins Freeview.