Network Insight Institute

Julie Flynn

Julie Flynn, Chief Executive Officer, Commercial Television Australia

From the position of the industry body, Commercial Television Australia, we have had a very busy couple of years in terms of the infrastructure roll out, and Ian McGarrity who spoke earlier has actually been managing that on behalf of all five free-to-air broadcasters.

You may be aware that recently the commercial broadcasters joined hands to present a television commercial which featured a star from each of the networks (Catriona Rowntree, Bert Newton and Joanna Griggs). To get them all together on one day took some doing, as you can imagine, but we had already decided to market our brand CTVA about a year ago to advertisers and to media buyers. That had been very successful so we learnt a few things from it. We had been under a lot of pressure because it was said that the broadcasters hadn't been promoting digital. Our simple answer was that you can't go out and sell a product if at the point of sale there is no product or, when a consumer takes the product home there is either no coverage in their area, or there is no content to be accessed.

Now that we have reached a point where there is coverage, content and equipment, we are in what we would call a delivery phase in which the focus has become marketing to the consumer, and making sure that the consumer gets as much information as possible about the benefits of digital television. In those last 2 1/2 years the rollout has reached 75 per cent of Australian households; by the middle of next year that will be around 85 per cent. In such a large country, to duplicate the existing 50-year-old analogue infrastructure with minimal interference to existing services has been no mean achievement. Although it may not be the sexy part, it is the absolutely essential part of delivering digital TV in Australia. In the UK, the platform rollout for ITV digital fell over for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that they didn't get the technical details right in the first place. That has not been the case here in Australia. We now know that there are, according to the latest figures from DBA, around 93,000 receivers, including STBs and integrated TVs.

Our conservative estimate for that the number will reach 120,000 by the end of 2003. The price of STBs has had a significant effect - the $299 figure seems to be definitely a sweet point. Those boxes are literally walking out of stores. I know of one supplier that has a new supply coming in, all of which have all been sold to retail outlets before they have even landed, so that it a very significant change in the way that things are being done. And having been in one small retail outlet myself recently, I can verify some other comments that have been made to me, that you can buy them for as cheaply as $193 or as part of a package. The message that we gave to the consumers in that commercial was that you can buy a STB and have a digital experience right now with an existing TV set. You do not have to continue paying to have that digital experience, and some of the sets that are in the marketplace enable you to change from 16x9 to 4x3 simply by punching a button on your remote control. So we will be very much focused on helping to develop that retail market.

You have heard a lot of comments about DBA. While the broadcasters are major supporters of DBA both financially and in every other way. The new relationship between the retailers, the manufacturers and the broadcasters has developed very strongly under Peter Webb's guidance. However, there is no point in getting the message out at every level if you are ignoring the consumer, and that is our main focus now.

In terms of content, 77 per cent of prime time was in widescreen digital by April 2003. The content is increasing all the time. All the broadcasters are developing their new dramas in widescreen digital. One of the networks is promoting their HD programming and I would just like to make a quick comment on HD. The BBC announced at last year's IBC in September that they would be producing in the future all their materials in HD, even though HD is not the standard in the UK or in Europe. And in the US, home of the biggest free-to-air broadcast networks in the world, the National Association of Broadcasters is solely promoting HD on its internet home page. Fox has recently announced that it will pick up HD as well, it has been driven by a couple of the other networks, CBS and ABC to date, so there is a lot more material becoming available in HD to the Australian broadcasters. That's also a significant change.

I think it is worth noting as well that although we haven't been able to judge the success of this yet, because the most recent figures were for the end of June, traffic to the digital pages of the broadcasters' website is increasing. I think that is very important in terms of simplifying the message that we were hearing from Scott Lindsay in Session 1, that there was a lot of confusion about what those messages are. Of course the DBA website actually lists all the products that are available at the present time. This information includes price range, whether they are HD, whether they are standard definition, what their picture resolution is and the like; so there is information available for people who are wanting to see that.

Because we now do have the coverage, the content and the equipment in the marketplace, our job will be to continue to drive the infrastructure rollout into the regions of Australia and then obviously to deliver content, and you will see increasing amounts of that from the broadcasters.

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