Australian Rules Football fans are rightly outraged that their game is not being broadcast live free to air on Friday nights and that other games during the weekend also look like getting second billing to Rugby League.
But they are pointing the finger in the wrong direction when they blame the AFL bureaucracy, the almighty dollar and the preferences of the Nine Network.
The finger of blame should be pointed right where it belongs – at the Federal Government and in particular the Minister for Communications Richard Alston.
And this is not just a story of a few outraged football fans. It is a story of government pandering to big media interests to the detriment of television viewers of all kinds nationally. Indeed, the people most affected by this litany of sycophancy to big media interest are precisely those who hate football broadcasts or sporting broadcasts of any kind.
The story goes back to later last decade when digital television technology came along. It opened up a lot of spectrum. Digital channels could be squeezed between the analog signals.
The airwaves are owned by the people. The government rations them to prevent a free for all that would cause chaos and jamming.
Until the advent of digital there was room for only five program channels – two public and three commercial. With digital there is room for many more. But the existing commercial broadcasters dreaded that. They did not want competition. So they managed to persuade the Government to impose one of the most restrictive television regimes in the developed world – to the great detriment of viewers.
The Government legislated a new digital regime in 2000 – with the dumb acquiescence of the Labor Party. It had four main elements:
– Each commercial network and the ABC must transmit a certain number of hours in High Definition Digital Television.
— A requirement to continue analog services as now until 2007.
— There would be no new commercial television licences until 2006.
— No use of datacasting (internet over the airwaves) in a way that would resemble existing broadcast services (news, drama, sport).
Datacasting uses some of the newly available spectrum under digital technology.
The requirement for High Definition means that all the spectrum owned by a given network is taken up with that plus the analog service. If the Government had allowed each network (including the ABC and SBS) to broadcast in whatever form of digital they wanted we would have had a whole different story.
In effect the Government has shut out the use of Standard Definition digital. Standard Definition takes up about a fifth the bandwidth of High Definition. Moreover, Standard Definition sets cost about $2000 as against $20,000 for High Definition. For practical purposes in the loungerooms of the viewing public there is no difference in quality between Standard and High Definition. Each offers excellent picture with no ghosting or snow. High Definition is only of value if you want a picture the size of a house.
If the networks were allowed to use their spectrum as they pleased, they could put out five different program streams in Standard Definition – say, two sport, one drama, one news, one sit-com – instead of only one in High Definition. In short, they could put out AFL and Rugby League and a drama program for those who liked neither sport.
Problem solved. That’s what they do in Europe.
But in Australia, the big media players have a stranglehold over government. They did not want five program streams. For them it is cheaper to put out one program and have the advertising audience neatly compacted. They certainly did not want the ABC to be able to have five program channels. A minor concession obtained by the Democrats and Labor was to permit the ABC to run ABC Kids as a separate program stream. That emphasises how easy it would have been technically to have had five program streams.
The commercials also prefer fewer free-to-air program streams because that makes their pay-TV more attractive.
But it means digital TV offers little to the public – hence the slow take up. It is not the fault of the technology, but the Government.
Senator Alston tried to defend this situation and explain the AFL-League conflict. He said, “”When you’ve got three broadcasters, and one broadcaster is contractually obliged to show rugby league, you do run into these complexities. If there was an easy solution, we would have found it.”
Twaddle.
There was an easy solution in 2000. Senator Alston ignored, favouring big media interests over the viewing public. In the spectrum now used by the Nine Network it would have been possible to broadcast live — on Standard Definition digital — the AFL and league — and opera. And Oprah.
We have been poorly served by successive governments’ media policies.