Mac Bank taking over Oz TV
Certainly they aspire to great heights. For the uneducated, Macquarie Bank
already own Broadcast Australia, the company that provides transmitter
facilities for the bulk of the local tv and radio industry, including no
less, your ABC. Of course, the provision of a service for a fee is what
business is all about, nonetheless taking a huge slab of taxpayer provided
funds and handing them to a highly profitable merchant banker is
questionable behaviour.
But not content with taking a couple of hundred million bucks for
transmitter services off the ABC, MacBank has come up with a few more ways
of milking the ABC cash cow. There is a little contract to supply audio
hardware and support (in the form of APT codecs) which form the basis of
our national radio network, their subsidiary, the Australian Captions Centre provides text captioning for the ABC and now they seem to fishing for our MCR facilities as well.
Of course Red Bee and the ABC have not committed to anything publicly, but
rumors have been circulating for some time about hiving off ABC’s master
control facilities, and there is obviously already in place a degree of
linkage that many regard as unhealthy. As the saying goes, if it smells
like a rat and looks like a rat, it probably is a rat.
–
http://www.qednet.biz