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Television

MTV's Approach to the Digital Mesh

Sydney.
The next speaker here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress is Gerry Gouy, Commercial Director for International Digital Media at MTV Networks. He begins by saying that today, there is no digital media any more - there is only media. Convergence is here - not for everyone, but for many.

Big media companies have been guilty of siloing media into old and new - so why the tipping point now? Gerry says that there has been a rapid shift of TV online, ubiquitous high-speed broadband (well, outside of Australia, at least...), a drop in broadcast media ad sales, and a simultaneous growth in online advertising (and here especially search and video ads).

TVs after Television

Sydney.
We're in the next session at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress now, with Robbee Minicola from Hybrid Television Services. She begins with a story about her grandmother sharing her recipes (giving away IP) - but the question remains: can you actually follow the recipes the way she can? The same is true in the television field, and Robbee says that 'TV is the new black'.

Watching television, users are mostly in a passive, lean-back state - focussed, relaxed, and easy to intrigue. This is critical to how content and services are delivered through the TV. But is a TV a TV any more? Today, TVs can be used to play games, download content, browse the Internet - when before, TV was drama, news, and sport, today its potential is virtually unlimited. Broadcasters must stop working with a narrowcast view of TV.

The Australian Media Industry: A View from the Top

Sydney.
I've travelled south for the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress, at which I'll speak tomorrow. Arriving this morning I've missed the opening keynote, but I'll try and blog as much as I can of the rest of the proceedings.

So, we start with a panel by Australia media industry leaders. Michael Anderson from Austereo begins by talking about the launch of digital radio, which he sees as an enhancement to what radio does - no longer something significantly new as it's taken so long to launch in Australia, but a useful addition nonetheless. He suggests that in the US Internet radio has not yet been a success - it is nigh anemic, and largely a failure, he says. The industry there is trying to grow through cost-cutting. The UK isn't much better, and Australia is in fact ahead of most other nations in terms of its digital radio market.

Media Responses to Convergence Culture

Brisbane.
The next plenary session at the CCi conference responds to Mark Deuze's talk - John-Paul Marin from SBS and Tony Walker (blogger at ABC Digital Futures and the ABC's Manager of Digital Radio) will share their own experiences of operating in the new, user-led, media environment that Mark has sketched out.

Broadband Innovation, Australian Content Policy, and the ABC

Brisbane.
We're back to keynotes here at the CCi conference now, and I'm in a session with Kim Dalton, Director of Television at the ABC. His main theme here, however, is broadband. He begins by noting the overall audiovisual policy framework in place in Australia, which arises from the perceived and real influence of the broadcasting media. A critically important goal of this policy is to achieve social and cultural outcomes - delivering diverse, quality, and engaging content. Elements of this are Australian content regulations, Australian drama productions, children's programmes, and content reflecting the nature of the Australian community. This even applies for pay-TV and advertising. Additionally, there are funding bodies for film, TV, and new media industries, and various other support structures.

Clay Shirky vs. Cultural Studies?

Over the last week or so, there have been quite a few responses to a recent talk by Clay Shirky in which he discusses our collective "cognitive surplus" that is now being harnessed by participatory, Web 2.0, produsage initiatives. Shirky's talk has been praised by some, and condemned by others; negative responses seem to focus especially on his apparent disdain for television, which he describes as a kind of "cognitive heatsink", dispersing surplus cognitive energy. (Skip to about 1:50 in the video below.)

Mark Scott's Lacklustre Vision for the Future of Our ABC

Somewhat overshadowed by the extensive if occasionally perfunctory coverage of the 2020 Summit in Canberra has been ABC Managing Director Mark Scott's own ideas paper, "The ABC in the Digital Age - Towards 2020" which was released last Thursday.

Scott also posted a kind of executive summary of the paper to the ABC's 2020 Unleashed site: here, he resorts to time-honoured platitudes about how in future "we will be saturated with choices about what to watch, listen to and experience; it will be like trying to hold back the ocean with a broom." (Huh?) His solution: more channels - "a suite of six ABC TV channels", plus "at least 15 radio services."

Scott's language reveals a curious myopia about future media developments, however: while in addition to the paper's title itself, even in the 28 short paragraphs of the Unleashed article the word 'digital' pops up a whopping eight times, references to 'deliver(y)' of content to audiences are just as common - by contrast, active participation of users is equated only with a greater choice of ABC-programmed channels, not with active user-led content creation.

The full paper doesn't do much better. Throughout its eleven pages, one dot point on page four notes that "a growing proportion of the public is interested in active engagement with media content creation, ranging from voting and forum discussion, through to collaboration in content creation", but whether and how the ABC intends to address such interest remains unclear. Even the "Creative Risk" section, where innovative forms of user engagement might seem most likely to appear, ultimately disappoints:

Beyond Broadcasting: TV as a (Deficient) Form of Streaming Media

Beyond BroadcastingContinuing the streaming media theme from Wednesday: the latest issue of the journal Media International Australia has now been released - "Beyond Broadcasting", edited by Graham Meikle and Sherman Young. I've contributed an article and have received permission from the editors to re-publish it here. In the article, I try to take a fresh look at television in an increasingly Internet-driven media environment.

Traditionally, the Net's equivalents to television (mainly, streaming media) have been viewed through the lens of the older technology; to some extent, streaming media has tried to mimic television's feel and format - this is visible in the user interfaces of media players like Windows and Real, and even (though perhaps with some irony intended) in brand names such as YouTube, Current.tv, or Democracy TV, the original name for the podcast feedreader Miro. I would argue that this is a case of what we could call a paleomorphising process: the tendency to shape new media technologies in keeping with older technologies. (In much the same way, it's taken decades for the mobile phone to look and feel like a mobile media and communications device, rather than simply like a wireless handset.)

Digital Media Innovation at the ABC

ABC Digital Media Forum Last Friday I went down to Sydney to attend and speak at the ABC Digital Media Forum, an internal conference exploring innovative possibilities for the national broadcaster especially in the user-led online environment. The ABC is doing pretty well in this field already, and from what I saw at the conference, there are plenty more exciting projects in the pipeline - some of these remain firmly under wraps before they're officially launched, though, so I won't mention them here.

My own contribution was to a session exploring the potential of embedding produsage-based models within the ABC framework, and I've already posted my suggestions here and over at Produsage.org; we had a very constructive discussion afterwards which especially also touched on the institutional requirements of the ABC as a taxpayer-funded, public service media organisation with certain obligations to citizens and government, and I think the immediate future for the organisation probably lies in a tiered approach which quarantines its premium, journalistic content to some extent from the potentially more unruly, raw material generated by users, but also explores possible ways in which the two can constructively connect with one another.

Club Bloggery 7: Election Flops on YouTube

Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and I have now posted the seventh instalment of our ABC series Club Bloggery, covering the online dimensions of the Australian election campaign. Just to mix things up a bit, this week we had a look at what's been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks, and found that (perhaps unsurprisingly) the more interesting developments are in DIY campaign advertising and mash-ups. Plenty of links included with the story, which we've also posted to our group blog Gatewatching - I encourage you to see for yourselves!

Election Flops on YouTube

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

In an election campaign as drawn out as this, you'd have to have excellent memory to remember the hype around John Howard's use of YouTube to make policy announcements. Some months ago, the media were all over the story - but unfortunately for the Prime Minister, much like the widely-predicted poll 'narrowing', the YouTube effect has been missing in action.

That's not to say that YouTube and similar sites haven't played a role in the campaign - but certainly not to the extent they've already featured in the U.S. presidential primaries, where debates between the candidates on either side of the political divide have invited citizens to pose their questions via YouTube, and where some politicians even announced their intention to run for President on the site.

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