Network Insight Institute

Maureen Barron2

Maureen Barron, Chair, Australian Film Commission

On 31 August 2001, the Minister announced the new Broadband Content Fund, which provides $2.1 million over three years. The first and smallest portion of that comes in next year, so that we'll be spending that money from July 2002. Now is the time to start thinking about what we are going to do with it. What's the best way to spend it? What do we know? More importantly, what don't we know and what do we need to learn? …

The first issue to consider is which content we should be funding, which is what the marketplace isn't funding. From what Colin says, that includes everything. While we are application-driven, we are not passive, so we have to know what we're doing and who to encourage. Is it re-purposed; is it multi platform; is it single platform; should it be a mixture? Given our industry development role, how much Australian content should be included? How can we participate in that debate? How should we apply the funds? This in turn raises the issue of business models: there is a strong possibility that we would be seeking a partner or partners to be involved with us in co-investing with the fund.
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We take on board what we know from the use of quotas, subsidies and regulation in other areas. Some of them will work here; some of them won't. I think that there is something to be learnt from those experiences. A mix of regulation, quotas and subsidy has certainly ensured that we have quantity and diversity of local material in other areas, which may well have been under-represented without those mechanisms, and a world class production industry. We start from that perspective. I know that others are going to talk about regulation so I won't talk about that now.

In terms of which content - both interactive and non-interactive - we think that audiences will want, we believe that the issue is the quality of the content. That doesn't mean that it's highbrow, but that it serves its purpose and does what it does well. We accept what everybody is saying, that widespread consumer take-up will be slower than predicted. That gives us a little bit more time to develop even greater levels of expertise. We know that in the UK and Canada, government and industry are shifting their focus to the critical issue of content. They say that it has overtaken supply as the main barrier to growth of high-speed broadband services and they are calling for a more balanced approach. Hopefully we can participate in that more balanced approach here in Australia.
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There is a lot of analysis in the [AFC's] broadband report [Jacka, 2001, Broadband Media in Australia - Tales from the Frontier]. It finds that there seems to be an enormous amount of content that is popular, but a consistent finding is that there is a minimal amount of content that is stand-alone, original, distinctive and peculiar to broadband. Maybe that's the way it is and the way it's going to be, and we have to take that on board, not looking for something that is so unusual and out of the box that it will shock us. We know that through all of the changes in television, people still want largely the same things. People still watch dramas, documentary, news, sport, etc, though the ratios may change. If there is lots of re-purposed content and it is popular, then we would like to think that Australian material is re-purposed or that Australians re-purpose other material.

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