| If Minister Helen Coonan made an emergency call to you for help, what would you advise her? Michael Gordon-Smith tackles the hypothetical | | Date Created: Aug 24, 2005, 10:57 AM |
 Wipe all the rules Australia currently has about digital broadcasting clean. That's the advice Michael Gordon-Smith would give Australian Minister Helen Coonan if she called him in for a crisis meeting to solve Australia's TV and broadband woes. And Mr Gordon-Smith should know. He was a member of the Australian Broadcasting Authority until September 2004 and was Executive Director of the Screen Producers' Association of Australia for many years before that. In this interview, he accepts Netvideo's challenge to imagine how he might advise the Government were it to ask for help to remodel Australia's media and broadband landscape into a better form.
He says the rules in place today prevent multi-channeling, for example, because it would be a challenge to the unique selling proposition of the pay-TV operators. "There is a series of compromises and deals which essentially ossifies the status quo and prevents innovation, experimentation and exploration of new ways of reaching the market with...new technology," he explains. The answer he submits is to liberalise Australia's broadcasting spectrum, both in terms of ownership for new entrants, and in terms of the use people can make of it.
Gordon-Smith explains the implications of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). He puts recent proposals to plow back free-to-air broadcaster tax into the film, TV and new media industry into the broader context of taxation revenue (and hypothecation), explaining why the proposal is probably not realistic.
Gordon-Smith's view is that there is a "sharp clash of interests" between what is good for the free-to-air (FTA) broadcasters on the one hand, and for most of the rest of the digital industries on the other hand. "My sense is that there are very few people within that [FTA] industry who can really look the future in the face - it has got to be pretty scary," he says.
He also comments on what the big new global media brands - such as the BBC and Google - mean for the Australian media landscape. (Real-time) "event" TV's premium will be a key part of the future model, he says. And the public broadcaster's role will also be key. Gordon-Smith assesses the relevance of the BBC's present set of ground breaking initiatives for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and contrasts those BBC initiatives with the ABC's current crop of commercial licensing tactics. He says the ABC's activity blurs the rules against ABC advertising and the ABC's activity today is arguably inimical to the ABC's role as an important public space.
Finally, Gordon-Smith comments on the legacy of the Australian Free Trade Agreement with the United States. He says the "deal" between intellectual property (IP) owners and the public is now weighted very heavily in favour of the IP owners. "That means benefit accrues largely to the major corporate distribution companies rather than to individual creators, but individual creators continue to buy a pup sold by that line of rhetoric in the way they have since Molly Meldrum resisted the calls for parallel importation on the grounds that the record industry was going to do wonderful things for Australian artists," he says. "They continue to buy that ridiculous line ...and the public is being sold a very bad deal."
Michael Gordon-Smith is Head of Continuing Professional Education with the AFTRS Centre for Screen Business.
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Sony Playstation Portable version can be right-click downloaded here
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Audio only MP3 version: can be right click downloaded from here.
Note for OSX Safari users: Browsers such as Internet Explorer and FireFox work fine for a right click download for the PSP and 3GP files above. But if you are using Safari, do not right click, but instead, press the option key as you click on the filename and, after downloading, change the filename to end in .3gp or .mp4 respectively.
Note for PSP users: after downloading the special .mp4 PSP version above, change the video's file name to the Sony PSP naming convention that is compatible with other file names you may already have on your PSP to avoid conflicts and ensure that the video shows up in the PSP video directory. |
| Leading Australian playwright, Stephen Sewell, talks about the impact of terrorism on the Australian psyche and his work | | Date Created: Jul 27, 2005, 06:00 AM |
 He wrote the script for chilling movies such as The Boys and Lost Things. His plays bristle with ideas as well as drama and his many titles, including The Blind Giant is Dancing, Welcome the Bright World and Sisters, are studied in schools and universities across Australia. So how does one of the nation's leading writers make sense of the recent wave of terrorism and violence and how is it affecting his future work?
Stephen Sewell is about to leave for an overseas Festival where his powerful drama, Myth, Propaganda & Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America, is to get its first international production. But just prior to departure, Netvideo caught up with him at his Bondi Beach apartment to ponder the state of the world. He talks about 21st Century challenges for a social critic and the crisis for democracy, for the rule of law and for even the very ecology that supports life on our planet.
He also describes his forthcoming direction of the film version of his widely admired play, Sisters, staring Stellan Skarsgard, Jacqueline MacKenzie and Rachel Blake.
Quicktime for Mac users here
Flash Video for Windows PC users here
Sony Playstation Portable version can be right-click downloaded here
3GP for video-capable cellphones can be right-click downloaded from here.
Microsoft Windows Media can be right click downloaded from here.
Note for OSX Safari users: Browsers such as Internet Explorer and FireFox work fine for a right click download for the PSP and 3GP files above. But if you are using Safari, do not right click, but instead, press the option key as you click on the filename and, after downloading, change the filename to end in .3gp or .mp4 respectively.
Note for PSP users: after downloading the special .mp4 PSP version above, change the video's file name to the Sony PSP naming convention that is compatible with other file names you may already have on your PSP to avoid conflicts and ensure that the video shows up in the PSP video directory. |
| Video blogging and its impact on the news media, film culture, international relations and Internet business models | | Date Created: 22 Apr, 2005, 06:35 PM |
 Blogs bristling with home-made videos are mushrooming across the Internet. They tell a highly personal story of every day life that promotes international empathy. Will they one day become a financial living instead of a hobby? Will the vloggers in their 20s not only stop watching the traditional television media in preference to the Xbox, Playstation and iPod, but actually supplant the staid "old" media with increasingly polished and highly efficient video production efforts? Are the emergent vlogger networks the 21st century's new media empires? One of the most elegant ways to watch vlogs is the ANT player. The software automatically downloads videos for RSS video feeds. Today, Netvideo interviews Jay Dedman, a member of the founding ANT team, about the ANT software and about the significance of vlogs. (The Quicktime version for Mac users is here and the Flash Video version for PC users is here). Unlike Rupert Murdoch demanding answers about the media's future from McKinsey for a King's ransom, you can find out the future of the media right here for free. With the release of Apple's new Tiger operating system this week making multi-party iChat video conferencing a reality, and strong rumours of a video-capable iPod/phone about to hit the market, there has never been a better time to find out about vlogging....
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