Network Insight Institute

Bruce Meagher

Bruce Meagher, Head, Corporate Affairs, Austar

Essentially, I will give you an overview of what [Austar is doing with interactive television], from which you will also see what we are not doing yet. In relation to the themes in other sessions, you will be able to make some assumptions about the business drivers, audience and consumer interests and capabilities which have driven us the way we have gone, and also have meant that we have not arrived at an interactive nirvana, as we would like to.
…
Probably the most interesting thing that we are doing from many of the content crowd's perspective is developing a show called Fat Cow Motel with a Queensland production company, Hoodlum Entertainment, and the Queensland government's Pacific Film and Television Commission (PFTC). I will be frank with you: this is something that we have done partly motivated by the fact that we have a 10 per cent drama requirement. That has certainly been a driver of the decision to do it, but we are also excited about it. The fact that we had this young production company come to us and sell this idea was also a key part of the decision. Fat Cow is a quite interesting concept, because it extends the event concept (like Big Brother) to another stage. It is a drama, a 13-part whodunit series, which will have whodunits each week and also overarching whodunits. It starts with the basis that it has to be good television: it must work as a stand alone. If you don't have any of the other interactive gadgetry, then you should still be able to enjoy the drama in itself. But we can overlay a series of other things that people can do - using the interactive television component, SMS and websites - so that there will be other plot lines and story lines running that you might access only through the interactive television component or only through the website or only because you can log on, give your mobile phone number and receive a clue by intercepting an SMS message between two of the characters. You will be able to participate in competitions. It is not one of those things where the outcome of the whodunit is voted on. It is not intended as an audience-driven narrative. The narrative will be plotted and structured and very clear, but there will be a number of ways in which you can guess what is going on and interact with the whole thing.

I do come back to the point that from our perspective it is more about the television series, the drama, the core content, than the interactivity. The interactivity is something that enriches and brings that out: it is not the fundamental driver.
…
There are some issues that remain. We have launched services that we think are very good. They are services that people can use because they are very easy to understand. Part of our purpose in starting in this gradual way is to educate people, to get them accustomed to using their remote control to do things other than change channel. We have tried to make the look and feel of the whole service very consistent, so that people can get comfortable with them and be educated in using these services. It is critical to educate audiences that these services exist and that they have value. There is a real issue for providers of digital television in trying to get a set-top box population out there. If audiences don't know what digital television is or what it can provide them, then it is very very hard to convince them to take up the services. It is particularly hard to convince them to buy an X thousand dollar television set or a Y hundred dollar set-top box to get a bunch of services they don't know anything about. They are certainly not going to pay that if it is just about getting a slightly better picture quality and sound. Given that all those displays that we are always taken to are always in beautifully blackened theatrettes with huge digital screens and surround sound (just like most living rooms in Bankstown, in my experience), that is a big issue. So we think that educating the audience is very very important: that is something that we want to do.

We think that this is something that really responds to scale. We regret that we are the only persons providing interactive television. We would like to see Foxtel and Optus doing it. We would like to see the free-to-air broadcasters digitising and offering these services. From both the applications and technology standpoint, and the content development standpoint, when you have enough critical mass, then you can start to see some really exciting things happening that we can't do on our own. That takes us back to one of the chicken and egg problems common in this industry: without the audience scale, you are not going to get great content; without really good content, why would you have audiences? In this case, there is an intermediate step, which is a commercial decision by some of the other broadcasters to get on board and start putting some of their weight behind it. Thanks.

«  Back

^  Top of page

Network Insight sponsors include: