Television's Future Vision

(Part 7)

Tier Zero would be the first level of set of telecommunications service tiers carrying media and communications services. The lifeline tier would play a vital role in the nation's communications resources and strategies and would carry community, cultural and educational nonprofit (CCEN) services while other higher-cost government and user-pays premium tiers would provide additional services.

Tier Zero would provide a public and technology neutral backbone to carry data from all forms of electronic media and communications regardless of the way in which the transmission and reception of this data is carried out. Its cost would be cross-subsidised by governmental and commercial service tiers in exchange for the economic, social and cultural benefits derived from its operation with both cash and non-cash support and sponsorship. Such a project can only succeed in the long term if there is guaranteed tenure - a legislative underpinning for the concept, requiring user-pays operators to provide resources and low cost access to their services for both audiences and the local communities through the instigation of the lifeline tier.

Epilogue 2035: Wither Television?

So what's really changed for us in our living rooms as we celebrate the fortieth birthday of Australian television?

The ideal of a more participatory, more involving, television was initially prophesied and hoped for by the televisual overlords that centralised broadcasting systems engendered. They were largely academics in favour of a Reithian and "culturally-uplifting" public-service television. And there were also the "captains" of successful media industries in the role of the oracles of commercial broadcast television - their power recognised by and encrusted upon the policies of government regulators through their capture and control of the laws of the land to promulgate their success: through oligopoly of distribution and selection of programs; through one-way centralised and increasingly expensive models of production and distribution; and finally through control of copyrights and technologies. We have lived with this model until now but its principles and early idealism are fading fast.

Now the new generation of Netheads take up the battle cry again: that technology will inevitably save the day - with or without our involvement - and bring us a better world. And government and the industry are complicit in this same blind enthusiasm; the same blind "faith" that Quirk earlier mentioned.

We do have a stronger television industry after the debacle and near-bankruptcies of the late eighties and this provides a more stable platform to make better Australian film and television. Also the presence of this conference looking at the foundations of a 40 year old television culture and industry - not to mention a hundred year-old film industry - now involving nearly 100,000 people in a full or part-time capacity, the participation of nearly every Australian as an audience member of the television platform, and the undeniable technological and productive vivacity of the industry, seems to indicate there's life in the ol' box yet.

However, there are significant changes occurring that will impact on the operators, creators and audiences of television, part brought about by significant and irrevocable changes in the pattern of our social activities - our cultural and social lives - and part because of the inevitable globalisation of increasingly cheaper goods and services flowing from the most cost-efficient to less-cost efficient nations.