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The free-to-air television that might have been

By Patricia Edgar - posted Friday, 14 December 2012


The first Children's Channel in the UK was set up in 1984. It became digital in 1999. The BBC's two digital children's channels were launched in 2002. A decade later the time was right for a new model. Yet the ABC Managing Director Mark Scott on Nov 18 2010, unashamedly argued to government, 'You've got challenges converting this country to digital television…Let us help you do that? A great way is creating a digital free-to-air children's television channel which will also be of educational benefit to this country, help the independent production sector, and be a renaissance of children's television.'

That avowed willingness to put the ABC at the disposal of government interests rang alarm bells publicly and the rhetoric did not match the reality of course. We got ABC3. The ABC called for projects that were high volume, low cost and derivative of adult series, not creative, educational or capable of leading a renaissance. The approach typified the limited thinking, opportunism and unwillingness to innovate that has dogged broadcasting in Australia. Networks continue to look for solutions that have been found elsewhere in the world, but the rest of the world is now short on solutions as well, and cable and subscription television have become very competitive.

In order to draw audiences to their outlets, and price free-to-air out of the market some big media players are pumping huge investment into drama and sports in particular. Home Box Office have demonstrated what a television renaissance really looks like with outstanding writer-driven multiple narrative series like Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, West Wing, The Wire, Dexter, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, Game of Thrones, Homeland. People want these programs and will pay for them, buy box sets or pirate them to get hold of them when they are first released. In Australia,in order to stem piracy Home Box Office series are now being shown on Foxtel within hours of going to air in the US. 'Express from the US' is the campaign catch cry and it's a good move. Some of these programs are finding their way to Australian free-to air, and the ABC and commercial networks are reminded how viewers crave excellent drama like Underbelly, Redfern, or The Slap but the competition from alternative sources of quality programming is now hurting.

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Sports is another classic example of fierce competition with payments for rights so high it is doubtful whether return on investment can sustain the strategy. The Olympics and the AFL Football are cases in point. Rights are so costly sharing arrangements are being negotiated. And there's the platform and audience functionality issue as audiences demand more functionality, interactivity and choice. Here is where Sport has overtaken Children's by leaps and bounds, leaving the children's industry well in its wake.

The challenge for kids programming is one of design and architecture rather than technical functionality. The technologies for a new service that could be a fully integrated multimedia service are already widely available around the world. Complex websites that offer high levels of interactivity are commonplace and many have video playing and audio listening capability. Most broadcasters have an on-demand listening and viewing facility now. Pod casts, social networking and games are widely available online and a wide range of media creation and editing tools is available free.

For children a broadcaster should design and build a robust, flexible, multipurpose platform that lets kids do what they want in the ways they want, when they want, including viewing their favourite programs on demand. At the moment most services are single purpose and assume a user will watch a program and then when they've finished that perhaps play a game which may relate to the program theme, then chat with a friend and so on. In today's world kids are very comfortable doing several things at the same time, keeping a number of windows open on their desktops so they can flip between them.

From a production point of view the challenge is to engage the right teams of people to conceptualise, design and run such a service. When groups from different cultures come together they tend to battle for power. If television people dominate such a new service the evidence so far suggests they will build an online TV delivery mechanism with a bit of interactivity on the side. If online people dominate they'll probably go for technical functionality over narrative and usefulness. . These are quite significant challenges but this is what the audience now wants. But if people who run the new service are in it for the money and simply want to exploit kids as a market then we needn't bother. And that takes us to the role children themselves might play in the design of a new service.

The phenomenon of YouTube, reputedly created (2005) by two friends who were having difficulty sharing a homemade video, demonstrates in startling terms how much material is 'out there' and how much people , particularly young people are interested in engaging in small production. A year after start-up, 65,000 videos were being uploaded every day and the site was receiving 100 million video views per day. Google saw the potential and that year bought YouTube for US$1.65 billion. Kids love YouTube. School yard word of mouth and texting mean they can promote their own little films and share very funny experiences widely with their friends. Trawling YouTube is a lot more fun than watching the umpteenth repeat of children's channel programs. This is not to say children, like adults, don't still respond well to first class narratives in live action and animation but such programs are all too rare as networks try to fill the hours on the voracious television beast with repeat programs.

The model for adults will not be very different from that described for children as time goes on, for ten years from now the young people clamoring for these services today will be the prime time audience of tomorrow. They will be getting their news from a variety of sources and although news programs are still the ratings winners for the networks they cannot remain the same with a 24/7 news cycle and online news services, not to mention citizen journalists on social media. Networks are searching for the next reality TV coup or the fashion that will follow the flood of cooking shows to save their bacon. These programs represent the fine weather before the next violent storm that leads managers to believe it will all be okay. Viewers will still watch: perhaps.

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I think imagination, enterprise and the brains of some very smart people are required. This is a most important issue for our times and our way of life. If free-to-air cannot afford to provide the services required maybe competitors will have to partner up. Maybe free-to-air will become one element in a wider offer - a loss leader – with content providers generating their profits downstream along the chain. This is happening to a degree with some drama production. In 1994, despite my best lobbying efforts at the time, the Film Finance Corporation allowed pre-sales of a series to both a commercial network, which paid a reduced price for a first run to meet quota requirements, and to the ABC which bought subsequent runs. This also happens with cinema films where, although rights can be purchased prior to production, subsequent television screenings, cable and DVD sales are deferred until box office revenue is exhausted. This orderly structure doesn't work when copies of a film are pirated and placed on the internet within hours of release.

It's all about reach and share still, because they're the metrics the industry is addicted to and TV is still the most effective medium to deliver both –although struggling massively and attempting to second guess audiences. Public broadcasting can only prop up free-to-air so long as Governments are willing to provide funds and this is under threat around the world. Even the iconic BBC is having problems and worrying about the next decision on its license fee in 2016. During his election campaign Governor Mitt Romney made clear he would cut funding to public broadcasting (PBS) in the US. In Australia a merger of ABC and SBS has been canvassed and Liberal Governments in the past have generally been less sympathetic to public broadcasting. Tony Abbott and his Treasurer are heralding budget cuts.

Ironically one of the most productive partnerships in this challenging context could be between education and television. Education has always taken a hiding from free-to-air television management who feared such a label would turn an audience off. The ABC abandoned its educational children's television department, school's programs were heavily reduced and children's producers generally eschewed 'education' to isolate their entertainment programs so no child would think they were an extension of school. Now with convergence, search and interactivity, education and entertainment have come together and kids have no issues moving easily between the two domains on the same technology. As a result teaching and learning are being transformed with kids enjoying taking the initiative in their learning. Universities are also undergoing cultural change as they wrestle with the implications of online learning. Hundreds of thousands of people are downloading lectures and materials to study voluntarily even when a course is not credited towards a degree. There are opportunities here.

A child born today in Australia will likely live to be one hundred years old and lifelong learning must become a social objective. There is massive potential for television to serve that need. Brian Cox, the famous physicist/presenter got huge audiences in the UK with his series The Wonders of the Solar System, when the BBC scheduled it in prime time. He is credited with changing the perception of maths and science subjects in schools with entries in A Levels up forty percent over five years. It's been dubbed 'the Brian Cox effect'. Imaginative educational television can achieve what governments and educators fail to achieve on their own.

We are now well informed about the importance of learning in the early years. There should be a partnership between government, pre-schools, schools and the media to develop an early childhood program designed around the goals of the Early Childhood National Curriculum Framework which would be the core of a community based early childhood project. Children come to media willingly yet we do not think to use technologies to develop and teach children; we use them to market to them.

The solutions to television's predicament may well lie in its origins. When the Government introduced television to Australia, when licences were granted and promises made, we set out down the roles and the obligations of broadcasting. The medium was intended to inform and entertain and benefit society. In a world that might have been, those administering broadcasting should have been held to account to follow the promises made, rather than pursuing short term interests and the bottom line. For broadcasting is not just another business. It is an integral component in our education and democratic political system. But a visionary idea does not play out in a world where marketers, like election campaign managers, narrow their audiences into demographics and special interest groups. So doing, they lead us into intellectual cul-de-sacs and inevitably they will lead the industry into economic oblivion.

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About the Author

Patricia Edgar is an author, television producer and educator. She was the founding director of the Australian Children's Television Foundation. She is also the author of In Praise of Ageing and an Ambassador for the National Ageing Research Institute.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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