The Minister for Communications, Stephen Conroy, can be a difficult man to read, and it would seem that some people are getting it wrong. Either that, or the Minister is giving out seriously mixed messages.
There is a push on at the moment for the federal government to bring forward a planned review of broadcasting regulation, particularly that relating to Australian content.
Some people in the industry have been confidently predicting that the review will be brought forward. “Everyone knows it will be because it has to be,” I was told last week.
But today in an article by Rachael Bolton in the Australian Financial Review, Conroy is quoted as saying there will be no review before the planned date of 2011.
Which means that television services provided over the internet and to mobile devices will be unregulated for at least two years, allowing them to take audience share away from existing players without being bound by the same Australian content regulations.
This is not an academic or a distant debate. Already, as anyone who has shopped for a television recently will know, internet delivered television services are being bundled with purchases of televisions and telecommunications packages.
Given that the content is offered cheaply or for free as part of a bundle, the search will be on for the cheapest programming available. Quality Australian drama will likely not be part of the package, leaving it marooned on declining free to air conventional stations and to a lesser extent, pay television.
As reported in Crikey last week there are two views in play about what should be done in the era of multiple platforms. The head of Foxtel, Kim Williams, has argued for more or less complete deregulation of television service, while the ABC’s Director of Television, Kim Dalton, wants Australian content regulation extended to cover television delivered to mobile phones and over the internet.
Conroy was expected by some in the industry to use a speech last Friday to indicate an inclination towards extending regulation. But instead, while he acknowledged that the whole question of content regulation needed review, he failed to say anything definite about his intentions.
Whatever your view on the Battle of the Kims, there are pressing arguments for broadcasting regulation to be considered sooner rather than later.
Decisions on issues such as anti-siphoning rules, which lock up key sporting events for free to air television, are being made without the bigger issues being properly considered.
Conroy’s insistence that there will be no review until 2011 is a slap in the face for both the Kims. Both want content regulation to be considered soon, even though they disagree on what the result of the review should be.
Failing to get to grips with the issue means that internet protocol television providers will have two years in which to take audience share away from existing players without being bound by the same rules.
If what Conroy’s office told the Fin yesterday is true – and I am told they his office was most insistent – none of this will be considered until after the television landscape has changed forever.
Very strange. It would be nice to get some explanation, but Conroy’s office did not return a call asking for comment this morning.
What I find intriguing about most of the debate about “internet television” is that it’s almost all still framed in terms of a few big, centralised broadcasters sending a few expensively-produced channels to the masses. Yet the internet is essentially an infinite number of channels. Any producer of video “content” — sheesh do I hate that word! — can send it to any number of viewers.
Moreover, tools already exist, such as Livestream and its competitors, which allow anyone to stream live video content, or pre-recorded material, right now. All they need is a computer, a camera and enough bandwidth.
I’ve done this myself, using a standard MacBook Pro laptop, its built-in webcam and a Telstra NextG mobile broadband connection — walking the streets of Sydney’s Surry Hills, broadcasting live to 100 people, and even talking a talkback call from First Dog on the Moon via Skype.
Sure, the technical quality was shitty, but that’ll be solved with the next generation of computers and the NBN.
An old Greek taxi driver understood the implications of all this when we discussed it the other day. Why watch the over-promoted and over-primped professional footballers and put up with the endless advertising when you can watch your own nephew play in the under-13s, streamed live to the families involved?
Where is any of that in the government’s thinking? Or the existing broadcasters’, for that matter?