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Networks want more deregulation

Networks tells the government TV broadcasting is over-regulated -and wants another licence cut, please.

Free TV Australia, the industry body which represents Seven, Nine and TEN wants the government to consider further deregulation as part of an upcoming review.

On Friday Senator Conroy’s Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy had received 21 submissions from industry players for its upcoming convergence review.

The review will look at all content delivery platforms including broadcast, mobile and fixed telecommunications and the internet and examine what old regulations need updating to keep up with technological chance.

A committee of independent experts will finalise the terms of reference by the end of March.

Free TV Australia is already raising issues over limits on minutes of advertising during a program and daily quotas of Australian programs. It is also flagging a cut to licence fees paid, hot on the heels on the government’s previous $250m rebate to commercial broadcasters (that was the one designed to maintain local content without actually requiring them to).

It also questions “the appropriate level of oversight and intervention by the media regulator (ACMA) across all media platforms”.

But the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance says we are overrun with foreign content, and wants the Australian government to ensure enhanced levels of Australian content to combat the deluge.

It is also pushing for support structures for the production and delivery of Australian content and urging that significant content remains freely available and accessible through public broadcasters.

Meanwhile one of Foxtel’s concerns is for copyright laws to be included in the review amid fears of growing online piracy.

Source: The Australian, dbcde.gov.au, Alliance

30 Responses

  1. Yep, NTSC stuff has always looked pretty poor for that reason, but that’s not an issue now except with old repeats since basically everything from America is shot in HD, except for a few reality shows (which still look better than old shows because shooting and editing digitally looks much cleaner).

  2. Ellaboo, no worries.

    Actually Secret Squirrel, all scripted stuff is shot at 24 frames in the US, whether on film or video (except daytime soaps, and perhaps Curb, but that’d be a stylistic thing). 30 looks ‘too real’ or something. And weird. And cheap.

  3. @Ellaboo – that’s not quite right either. The US shut down most of its NTSC transmitters back in 2009. They now use ATSC which supports a number of different frame rates.

    However, even when 29.97fps NTSC video is converted for PAL transmission, they don’t just slow it down by 20% – I think you’d notice that! They usually use “pulldown” which maps 5 half-frames of NTSC to 4 half-frames of PAL (with a very small speed adjustment to account for the diff between 24 and 25fps).

    The above only applies to programs shot on NTSC video. What Jack writes is actually correct for those that are shot on film which is 24fps.

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