Stephen Conroy today announced spectrum planning and limited funding for Australia’s Community TV sector whose long term survival was threatened by the enforced move to digital.
That community TV has managed to survive in 2009 is quite remarkable given the obstacles they have been forced to deal with over the years. TV broadcasting is not a cheap business and in Australia the landscape and associated infrastructure is totally dominated by commercial interests and the well healed publicly funded ABC and SBS. Despite this, places like Channel 31 in Melbourne have managed to find a funding niche and a support base that has enabled them to produce exciting and innovative TV. According to Jim Wright at the long running Channel 31, today’s announcement offers the sector a degree of certainty and is “a fantastic opportunity” for the organisation.
Community TV goes digital
The limited financial support included in today’s announcement will certainly help offset some of the costs associated with digital transmission but in the long term, the allocation of spectrum and the waiving of licence fees offers community organisations a chance to maintain and extend existing sponsorship deals and plan for the future. In a media landscape dominated by mainstream players and big government, today’s announcement is probably as good as it gets for community broadcasting in Australia.
Footnote.
Community TV gets a bad rap occasionally but just to put the whole issue of funding in some sort of perspective, the $2.6 million allocated by the federal government today to assist community TV in the digital transition is likely to be split four ways, ie about $650,000 per station, which is the about the same as the annual salary of Mark Scott, CEO of the ABC. The rest of the money for community TV, like community radio, comes from the communities they serve. Maybe its a model that should be applied to the ABC.
