I think it’s unreasonable to complain that ABC’s news bulletin doesn’t adequately cover overseas. Honestly, you’ve got the entire internet for international news, including ABC News Online (append one of their dozens of rss feeds to your broswer), as well as any number of foreign magazines that do the rounds at the office. The broadcaster’s prerogative is domestic, and if it cedes that to the Commercials in an attempt to pointlessly compete with SBS World News, then we really are in trouble.

I’m sure both broadcasters will end up charging for downloads in the future, which will be a pity

Someone should inform them that it’s almost the year 2009.

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/2008/12/18/the-future-for-the-abc-and-sbs-public-service-not-public-broadcasting/

It was actually Stphen Conroy who has raised the matter of the transmission costs for ABC and SBS:

“Despite pressure on the budget from the global financial crisis, the extra money will come under a new three-year funding deal to meet Labor’s pledge to adequately fund public broadcasting.

Senator Conroy said the amount of extra funds was “a matter of ongoing deliberation by the cabinet”. SBS has asked for an extra $70 million a year. The ABC is believed to want between $50 million and $100 million a year.

The Government may get the ABC and SBS to share transmission costs and possibly some administration. The ABC spends about $170 million from its $834 million in government funding on transmission, and SBS $80 million from $188 million. Savings would be put into the expensive promise to create Australian drama.”

Link from Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald

Linked text

Agree with all of your points about the distinctive Charters, cultures and missions of ABC and SBS. The Australian media ecology is much stronger for having these two distinct organisations.

SBS – TV only produces their news and Datleine. Everything is outsourced either by commissioning or acquiring on completion from independent companies. ABC also outsources a great deal of content and plans to do even more so in the future. So, both broadcasters are a lot more than stand alone entities.

So for instance, if we want to talk about the provision of on-line services, it’s these independent companies who bear much of the brunt of the costs. Now production companies also have to produce on-line content, but there isn’t a budget increase to do more with. The money either comes out of the production values, or the producer’s pockets.

I’m sure both broadcasters will end up charging for downloads in the future, which will be a pity, but they’re constantly looking for ways to commercialise product. So, another question is whether audiences think this is a good idea.

There is an entire radio broadcast network that is very important to new migrant and multicultural communities. If you are from an OTE background where do you go? The ABC? Ten? Pay? 2GB? Sixty-Eight languages are served there.

There is a very good translation/subtitle/Closed captioning business there.

It may not seem that way to television viewers but SBS produces a lot of local product across the network. More than anyone in Australia, full stop.

Anyhoo, Lets look at today on Tee Vee.

6pm Global Village

6:30 World News

7:30 Rex (OK waaaaaay too much Rex tonight but apparently the kiddies love it)

9:30 More World News

10 Hebrew Language film

11:40 Spanish language film

Tomorrow night you get things like Counter Culture, the usual Hitler doco, a French film, a doco, more world news. I don’t see a lot of American or British programming there.

Wouldn’t we be better off having special channels within the ABC that focus on foreign content (ie Inspector Rex)and including the Australian multicultural original content within the ABC’s brief?

Sure, but in effect we already have that, it’s just not called the ABC. But there is another reason why not to merge. The charter and programming brief is absolutely distinct from that of the ABC, this creates a different culture and mindset in how you do things.

An established infrastructure and culture to deliver a different kind of content to a subset of Australian communities exist now, so why not allow them to continue rather that absorbing them into something else where the specific impetus that drives them does not exist and probably never will?

There are some things they could do that make sense as Margaret Simons points out her blog The Content Makers.

Not all of it is about the “front end” of the ABC – the content the public sees, hears and reads. I understand the Government is getting seriously concerned that a large part of the taxpayers’ dollars goes straight to the Macquarie Bank, via Broadcasting Australia, under the transmission contracts that form the expensive “back end” of ABC and SBS’s ability to reach their audiences.

Broadcasting Australia types are in the habit of referring to the public broadcasters as their “captive clients”, which does not bode well for the deal the taxpayers are getting under the current arrangements.

One of the things the government review is considering is whether SBS and the ABC could combine their “back ends” when it comes to transmission, which would presumably bring an interesting level of scrutiny to the existing arrangements.

Once, of course, the transmission infrastructure was Government owned, but it was privatised in 1999, then sold to the Macquarie Bank and rebadged as Broadcast Australia.

I think the dollar figure is something like a third of the funds we pump into the public broadcasters. I’d stand corrected if someone has the correct number.

Indeed, one of the prompts to this inquiry are the issues faced by both ABC and SBS in providing online services. Online is not mentioned in the Charters of either of them, and providing online services imposes new costs upon them. Unlike radio and television where the marginal cost of delivery is zero (i.e. once the infrastructure is built, there are near-zero cot differences between delivering to 100 or 1 million people), downloads present a direct cost to the ABC and SBS in terms of use of bandwidth, so that the more people who use their online services, the more it can cost them. Obviously this is not a desirable situation for media that seeks to be available to all Australians,

In our submission, we engage with the question of social innovation. Social innovation historically has come in one of two ways. Public service broadcasters come from the top-down, institutional design approach, where governments identify a problem and design an institution to address it.

The other way is bottom-up social innovation, which has largely driven the Internet. The US military may have first built it and designed it, but almost all of the innovations that have spun off from it have come from other sources, in a decentralised, fragmented manner. The question for 21st century PSMs (known as PSBs in the 20th century) is whether they can capture the best of both approaches – top-down and bottom-up, institutional and decentralised. We hope that our submission provides some thoughts on how that may best be achieved.