The channel was officially launched at noon on 30 March 2008 with a special "kingmaker" political debate held within the Parliament building and featuring most of the elected minor party leaders.

The New Zealand Government announced in November 2006 that it would finance two new TVNZ channels for the then-upcoming Freeview platform, in a six-year plan costing NZ$79 million.

This was confirmed when Broadcasting Minister Jonathan Coleman stated on behalf of the government that they would not extend further funding for the channel due to low ratings.

[4] This was despite viewing figures that suggested half of all households with Freeview at the time were watching TVNZ 7 – around 700,000 people – and not the 207,000 claimed by Coleman.

These included Glen Larmer, Jenny-May Coffin, Brooke Dobson, Ben Christie, Tiffany Hardy, Fiona Anderson, Filipo McGrath, Andrew Scott, Susana Guttenbeil, Lisa Glass, Sandra Kailahi, Christopher Lynch, Sonia Voigt and Katie Chapman.

The debate, co-sponsored by InternetNZ, was hosted by Damian Christie, and moderated by The New Zealand Herald's Fran O'Sullivan and Russell Brown.

It later emerged in papers released under the Official Information Act that Bill English had re-written the majority of the script to replace lines written by TVNZ with rhetoric that might be considered more conducive towards National Party policies.

[8] TVNZ claimed that because they were not in an election year and that the promo in question was promoting another programme that they did not have to present a balanced view and that many of their viewers did not care about giving other voices equal time.

Media commentator Brian Edwards pointed out that without TVNZ 7, New Zealand was about to join Mexico as the only other country in the OECD without a public service television channel.

The survey, conducted before the decision was made to close the TVNZ 7 channel, was not released to the public due to being "commercially sensitive", despite the station being non-commercial.