Global streaming services have transformed the way the world not only consumes film and TV but also produces them. In Australia, 78% of households subscribe to at least one streaming service and we spend around $2 billion a year on subscriptions, yet the average amount of Australian content on those streaming services is less than 2%. In some cases, it is zero.
Is that because Australia is not capable of making high-quality film and TV for domestic consumption? No. Australian film and TV rate extraordinarily well domestically. In fact, it’s not just Australians that like our stories — our cultural product is highly exportable, with almost half of Australia’s production companies generating export revenue, compared with an average of 7.6% for Australian businesses.
The amount of local content on streaming services could be a lot higher with investment from streamers and the right policy framework from government. The Koreans are exporting their film, TV and music, the Nordic countries successfully export Scandi-noir; it is well within the capacity of the 12th wealthiest nation in the world to export what others call our “blue-sky drama”, “desert noir” — a genre all of our own — as well as other high-quality content.
The real reason we don’t have more Australian content is simple: it’s a lot cheaper and easier for streamers to pay for a show made elsewhere and to beam that out across the globe. Pay once, stream everywhere. The streamers are businesses and naturally they seek to maximise profits by minimising costs. The interests of Australians are different, though complementary: local jobs and local stories.
Local stories and a national culture require an investment in local content.
This is the concern of the Australian screen sector. We want an Australian screen sector that goes beyond functioning as a giant set for American film productions, that goes beyond a fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) service model. Our vision of an Australian screen sector is one that supports local actors, writers, directors, editors, set designers, composers, editors and the entire screen ecosystem. We want to tell our own stories — who else would have produced Gallipoli, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Prisoner, Muriel’s Wedding, Samson and Delilah, or The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? A Wentworth, a Wakefield, a Rake?
The streamers have raised concerns about potential capacity constraints that might push up production costs. Bottlenecks and constraints may occur in the use of studio space, but that’s not the only place to shoot good TV and films. In Australian productions we can shoot on site, in smaller studios, we can animate in workshops of various sizes, and can develop, cut and engineer across our entire continent.
Quality stories are told with good investment in good writing and creative development up front.
In terms of human capital, the screen sector is one of the most under-utilised sectors in the Australian economy, with no shortage of actors, editors and writers. Many of our best pursue careers overseas after starting their work here, but these opportunities are disappearing without an investment pipeline at home. We used to have a well-worn travelling circle of talent: cut your teeth here on quintessentially Australian shows, work overseas, then return home to make great stories, with a career spanning continents. If we continue as the streamers seek, with limited to no Aussie content, that circle breaks.
But even if there wasn’t capacity, you don’t extinguish your national culture and the potential growth of a sector because we don’t yet have the capacity. You build and train that capacity.
Local content quotas are in the ballpark of 30% in many European countries. The Australian sector is advocating for a modest 20% content quota and for sub-quotas to ensure Australian content isn’t just reality TV but also drama, documentary and kids TV. Substantive productions where Australian writing, acting, directing and screen talent are employed and, importantly, where we will continue to generate and hopefully export our culture.
And the benefit to the Australian taxpayer? It would come at no additional cost to consumers but be drawn from existing subscription fees paid to global streaming services. We could also see ourselves on the world stage, and generate revenue from what we know is a highly exportable product.
These are the types of jobs a highly developed economy can be proud of supporting.
Agree 100%
By “local” films do you mean the steaming pile of cr#* which the ABC ran recently- the Miss Fisher and the crypt of tears ? I guess it put some people in work but so does sweeping streets. It was fascinatingly horrible. The villain of the plot as I grasped it was the butler (!!!) who was actually the father of the lord and his brother yet noone seemed to be aware that father was acting as a butler. Yes, the Brits produce similar quality with the Father Brown nonsense (black faces everywhere in a 100% Catholic English village of the 1950s) but I assume locals in Britain consider it pointless rubbish.
And not paid for by the taxpayer
I think you’ll find there is a very big audience for that. it does really well overseas, and the character has been remade a few times. The taxpayer invests in a lot of things. I don’t like all of them either. You won’t find any film or Tv from any country outside the USA that doesn’t have some government involved, whether that is a location incentive, or favourable tax deal. A bit like a lot of industries that compete against much bigger world competitors.
Global streaming services have transformed the way the world not only consumes film and TV, but also the way some choose not to consume film and TV. In Australia, 22% of households apparently couldn’t care less.
If we look at Scandi-noir as an example, it didn’t take streaming dollars to produce the quality television that came out of the Nordic countries. Australia has had plenty of investment in making television, but we’re not seeing anything near the quality of many comparable and even smaller economies than ours. Given how many Australians end up going to work in Hollywood or the UK, it’s hard to say that we aren’t producing the quality of people. Maybe it’s something in the kinds of shows that get selected, or that simply we’re too inline with the rest of the Anglophone world to need distinctive content when we can easily import it from the UK or the USA.
That’s why I’m not too fussed that we aren’t getting the quality of content out of Australia. There’s already far too much great television and films being made, and it doesn’t feel like there’s much distinctively Australian missing – beyond a vague sense of national pride.
I was lucky enough to attend a seminar given by some of the bigger creative minds behind some of the more famous Scandi shows. The surge of brilliant shows they produced came after a huge investment by the governments of Sweden and Denmark (and later Norway) in original content. They were quite brilliant in the development scheme they devised, having taken aspects of UK and US TV systems. From the talk the creators gave it came about because the Culture Ministers in those countries looked at the state of their TV -which was derivative of US shows, but couldn’t compete – and decided something new needed to happen. And they put money to this.
Movies are made to suit the audience and make money, they are entertainment.
As with out musos we had a great system and if yo are odl enough they started in pubs.
But Bob Hawke decided to index alcohol so a beer at the pub became so expensive we all sat at home drinking cheap wine,
We are now wardrobe drinkers, a term that was used in derogatory term about those who drank at home and mainly alone.
I am not talking about the so called 5 aclock swill as named by those who like to stay home and drink alone to hide.