ABC TV Australia Boss Says Online TV is A Risk To Traditional TV
The explosion in Catch up TV and Online TV services could pose a significant risk to free to air tv industry. So says ABC TV in Australia head of television, Kim Dalton. He has called for an overhaul of Australian content regulations for TV broadcasters to ensure emerging online and mobile TV players did not rush for cheap international programming and cripple the local production industry.
Mr Dalton stopped short of suggesting online and mobile TV operators should be bound by similar local content quotas as free-to-air broadcasters – commercial TV networks for instance must air at least 100 hours of drama each year – but he warned the “revolution” in how TV content is being watched needed urgent industry and regulatory attention.
Speaking at a broadband conference in New Zealand, Mr Dalton said Australia was experiencing an “explosion” in the “number of platforms, business models and technologies” which can deliver TV services to viewers and that they posed “significant risks” to free-to-air TV and the Australian production industry.
Although the Federal Government’s national broadband network [NBN] is widely expected to usher in scores of new TV-style services over the next five years, a number of hybrid IPTV [internet protocol] ventures are already being planned for 2010 by local and international companies looking to capitalise on the boom in online video streaming.
Australia’s biggest online publishers have been astonished this year by a sudden surge in streaming of “catch-up TV” shows online. Streaming numbers are approaching 5 million per month between ninemsn and Yahoo!7, and Ten’s MasterChef has proven to be the single most popular TV franchise online so far, generating 9 million video streams during its broadcast season.
Mr Dalton, who is also chairman of the free-to-air TV industry’s marketing group, Freeview, said if a new regulatory framework for Australian content was not extended to “somehow cover” emerging digital TV services, international content would ultimately take over because it was cheaper for aspiring TV providers to acquire. The NBN, he said, would only entrench the problem.
Full story – http://www.smh.com.au/business/content-rules-needed-for-internet-tv-20091105-i0b0.html
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This internet technology is something else. If people stopped buying cd’s for mp3′s it is only logical that the internet is a threat to the tv industry as well. Push comes to shove all tv will be viewable online with commercial revenue coming from adsense type ads instead.
Traditional TV will be gone like in 20years if not sooner. And that’s a fact. Just face it that Internet TV is much more convenient. Think all modern TV channels should move to the Internet. The sooner the better.