Saturday 6 May 2017

Is it time to do the kindest thing to Australian television?



Some 28 years ago, due to the success of The Comedy Company, I was invited to speak at the National Press Club in Canberra. In my address, I said that it was only by pure luck that the show made it onto air in the first place because it was so hard for people outside "the industry"  to sell a program to one of Australia’s three commercial networks.  (It was equally hard to sell a program to the ABC but that is a subject for another time.)

Because of this, I said I looked forward, perhaps overoptimistically, to a time when there might be more than just three commercial networks that producers could approach to get their programs on air. Some press reported that I had “surprised” the audience by “calling for deregulation” but in fact I was not in favour of deregulation. I was just, like many others, frustrated by the three-way monopoly that has dominated Australian television through my lifetime What I was calling for was more competition.

The justification for the limited number of broadcasters in the Australian industry was always the limited VHF and UHF bandwidth thus the potential diversity presented by the switch to digital broadcasting which allowed a greater number of channels on air was seen as a great opportunity to break down this tri-opoly. The established networks however were very quick to make sure that they would operate any new channels that appeared. For many years they lobbied the government feverishly for the ability to multi-channel, arguing that they were losing money due to competition from DVDs, computer games and the Internet. The government finally amended the broadcasting regulations to allow the existing networks to broadcast on several channels simultaneously.

The result, as we now see, is basically a disaster and has not even made a difference to the profitability of the channels; they continue to lose money and to complain about competition from other sources such as Netflix.

Multi-channelling by a single broadcaster was, of course a bizarre notion from the outset. If a broadcaster could not attract sufficient viewers to make one channel profitable, how could they attract enough to make several channels profitable? Surely having multiple channels would only divide an already shrinking audience, which is exactly was has happened. And wouldn’t operating three channels entail purchasing three times the amount of programs? But, of course, there was never any intention of broadcasting three times the amount of programs or, at least, paid programs. Of the more than twenty channels we now have, about a third of them are shopping channels, that is to say, channels which only screen advertisements. The programming on these channels is therefore not only free, the advertisers pay the networks for the time. This is a television dream – to have advertising income but no actual programs.

The other multi-channels also involve little or no program outlays; they either screen time-delayed programs which have already been shown on the primary channel, or inexpensive repeats.

In fact is that the real benefits of multi-channelling were:

1.       The circumvention of any restrictions on advertising. Once upon a time the Broadcasting Control Board (remember them) put limits on the amount of advertising a channel could screen per hour. The Australian government abandoned that idea many years ago, opting, in response to the constant whingeing from the networks, for the absurd principle of “self-regulation.”  The result is that networks are now permitted to run as many ads per hour as they think the audience can stand, and to even run channels that are 24 hour-a-day continuous advertisements.

2.       The circumvention of any kinds of quotas on original Australian drama or children’s drama. One might have expected that, if a network was obliged to screen 100 hours of original prime time drama per year when running one channel, it would have to screen 300 hours of such material when running three channels, but that is not the deal. Whatever quotas now exist, and they appear to have been pretty much abandoned, the networks can spread them across all of their multi-channels.

3.       The ability to schedule programs across several channels at different times allowed the FTA broadcasters to meet the of challenge of Foxtel by offering similar flexibility in viewing times. (We must remember that for twenty years the networks were terrified of Foxtel which now seems like a minor problem compared to the Internet and is itself now facing the same sorts of problems from on-line entertainment as the FTA broadcasters.)

4.       The granting of commercial digital channels exclusively to the existing networks shored them up from any challenge from new players entering the scene. Thus the one opportunity in the last 50 years to throw the industry open to new players came and went without incident and the potential revolution that digital broadcasting might have triggered was thwarted.

The other question that has dominated network operators has been how to establish a pay-per-view system. All networks were keen to set up their own pay services like Stan and have canvassed all sorts of ways to move their programming onto the Internet where it can be pay-walled, only to be overshadowed by the services like Netflix that strode onto the field armed with a vast library of US movie and TV titles.  

Now, in response to further sobbing and bawling from the networks, the government has agreed to dispense with licence fees, meaning that three large companies are being granted access to big slabs of precious broadcasting bandwidth (technically a public asset like a mining tenement) without having to pay any kind of royalty to the nation.

In other words, the television industry now occupies a position almost identical to that of the (former) Australian car industry except that it doesn’t employ enough people to justify direct government subsidies. Rather, successive Australian governments have supported it by removing almost every requirement relating to social responsibility and, more importantly, refusing to let competitors enter the market.

Indeed, when people talk about the "television industry" they are not talking about the technology as a whole; they are referring to three companies which dominate it.
Back in the early Nineties, British broadcasting television consisted of three BBC channels, one ITV channel which was the commercial channel and Channel 4 which was financed from advertising revenue from ITV. Time on ITV was allocated to various companies who held licences to broadcast on the network at various times and in various territories. For example, as its name suggests, London Weekend Television had a licence to broadcast in London on Weekends. Companies like Thames Television, Granada, TV-AM, Anglia and Yorkshire Television etc had licences for other times and other places. Those licences tended to be automatically renewed until Margaret Thatcher put an end to it. She decided to put all those licences up for auction, which not only raised a large amount of money for the national coffers (Carlton outbid Thames with a £43 million per annum offer) and led to massive changes in commercial broadcasting.

The licences granted to Australian television broadcasters have been rubber-stamped for over 50 years. The notion of a licence being cancelled has never been contemplated, even when networks went out of business or changed owners or even had foreign owners prompting the question, “What would it take for an Australian network to lose its broadcast licence?”

The answer it appears, is nothing. Not only has the idea of cancelling an operator’s licence never been considered, licences are able to be bought and sold without the new owner having to pass any kind of suitability test.

The bottom line is that the Australian television industry is probably the most protected industry in the country, and one wonders why this is so. In an age where Facebook has more to do with deciding elections than print or  television, the networks' political influence is surely waning and they certainly don't have entire towns dependent on them for employment. And despite all the government's commitment to fostering Australian talent and supporting the film industry, current network programming consists almost universally of "reality" shows (drama programs made without writers or actors) and franchised international gameshows and talent quests.

Perhaps all the politicians have shares in Google and Netflix and are content to sit back and watch the television networks disintegrate from the corrosion of their own incompetence. 
But surely it's cruel to watch them suffer like this. Perhaps it's time to take Australian television to the vet and do the kindest thing?

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