Towards an Australian Digital Children's Television Channel?

Lee Burton and Peter Maggs from the Australian Children's Television Foundation are the next keynote speakers at ATOM 2006, speaking on the children's television debate. The Australian Communications and Media Authority's current review of children's television standards provides a backdrop to this debate. They begin by showing a brief video of kids' statements of what thye'd like to see on TV - perhaps in the form of a dedicated kids' TV channel...

Peter now notes the long history and conflicted future of the ACTF. Government requirements call for 260 hours of C and 130 hours of P programming; within this C quota, Australian TV channels must show a total of 32 hours of first-run children's drama (financed usually around 30% with txpayers' money). However, such shows are invcreasingly shown at times when the intended audience isn't around - kids typically aren't home at 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon, for example. Daytime programming is largely filled with U.S.- and Japanese-made animation, which is often provided to channels free of charge and makes its money through selling related merchandise. In the afternoon, on the other hand, the 4 p.m. timeslot is filled with locally-made shows competing for the same audience, even though the audience isn't likely to be home yet. This could be seen as a waste of taxpayers' money. On the other hand, the audience figures for kid watching TV peak between 5 and 10 p.m. - along with primetime for other demographics.

For networks, then, producing and showing those 32 hours of home-made drama programming is more a form of contractual obligation than anything else - and indeed the networks argue in favour of abolishing the 32-hour obligation because of the poor ratings which their indifferent programming strategies generate. There are also few repeats - so there is a great archive of home-made children's television programming, made in good part with taxpayers' money, which has hardly been shown at all on Australian television. Thus, Peter argues for an Australian Children's Channel to be introduced along with other changes to the Australian digital broadcasting environment - not as another Nickelodeon, but following a public broadcasting model: featuring pre-school entertainment televisionl, drama, educational programmes, news, and current affairs.

Many overseas channels already have such channels - the BBC has two, for example, and one of the most popular programmes here is the 5 p.m. BBC Newsround news for kids programme. Importantly, though, such a channel would also include user-generated content from the kids' themselves (and Peter now shows a couple of examples of such DIY content).

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