Free TV’s wish list: Reduce our fees; Let us do less for kids; Include our digital channels in the content quota; Don’t restrict when we can show stuff; Ease up on the advertising regulations
Australia’s free to air broadcasters have based a call for cheaper licence fees and reducing its obligations around content on the claim that IPTV is now a genuine competitor.
The shopping list of requests to the government, also includes an end to limits on when programs can be shown which were created to protect children, loosening the obligation to provide programming for kids because the ABC is already doing it, reducing the regulation of advertising and a reexamination of the current obligations to meet a quota of Australian-made content on the mainstream channel.
The wish list – which was released late on Friday afternoon – appears in Free TV Australia’s submission to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy‘s review of media regulation.
IPTV allows video to be delivered to consumers via the internet. Free TV also claims that timeshifting of viewing is making timezones “irelevant”. However, timeshift data from OzTam suggests that shows on the mainstream TV channels are still typically watched as live by more than 90% of the recorded audience.
Ah yes, because all the commercial monopoly of 3 (trioploly??) needs is another $250 million rebate on top of the last one they received already.
I’d have no problems with their demands at all…if the Government finally opened up the rest of the spectrum to new players, let alone a 4th commercial license at a the very least. The last seriously closed shop in Australia deserves new competition in return for hundreds of millions in Government largess.
There’s no way they’ll open up the spectrum to new players.
Its going to be to be sold to the telcos for 4G, the government are banking on it for billions in revenue.
Gee, what, more rubbish NOT to look at, is it me or is TV looking less likely Im going to watch it, 1..we have 16 channels now, and what’s on them.? 40 yr old reruns that were bad when the first appeared, are they relevant into todays market.? the scripts are unbearable to listen to let alone the torture having to pollute my brain with the visual, consider this TV programmers.! we have less leisure time available today, so if I’m to utilize those precious moments you’d better have something that keeps my trigger finger away from that off switch. And what’s with all the good movies.? where did they disappear to.? nothing on until 10pm and by that time I’m spent. TV, like magazines are pushing people onto the web AGAIN.! brainless TV executives living in a bubble.
If this gets up that means more reality tv shows! What next The real housewives of Toorak? Enough please!!
anyone know which five star location conroy was flown to for this presentation? Surely that would’ve fit in with a network funded, long w’end junket…
No to all points. And an end to self-regulation, please. And no more “local content” which is a talking head intro for a foreign show.
Open the spectrum up. More competition. They have it too easy.