Pay TV slams FTA rebate
The Pay TV sector joins a chorus of commentary that criticises some $250m that will be handed back to commercial free to air networks.
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under Subscription
ASTRA chief executive Petra Buchanan has lashed out at the Federal Government’s rebate to commercial television networks, claiming it was mainly designed to prop up business models that were “under threat”.
“Taxpayers are yet again being asked to subsidise the businesses of foreign-owned broadcasters to help them meet existing content obligations — it’s an outrageous affront to Australians,” Ms Buchanan has told The Australian.
“It is couch-potato policy that reduces their incentive to invest, compete and innovate, and ignores innovators such as the subscription television sector, which has no trouble meeting its own Australian content obligations year after year without a cent of government assistance.”
The rebate, which will slice around $250m off license fees, was pitched by Senator Stephen Conroy as a move to step to ‘protect Australian content on commercial television’ but there were no new content conditions placed on networks as part of the rebate.
“The rebate is also in recognition of the current level of licence fees in Australia compared with other countries such as the US, UK and Canada, and the new technology and commercial challenges facing the sector, including the switch to digital television,” said Conroy.
The Pay TV industry, already critical of ‘protections’ supplied by the anti-siphoning list, matched other critics of the government rebate.
The Age described the move as a “$240m gift for TV networks,” Crikey dubbed it “just an ugly bribe,” and Fusion Strategy media analyst Steve Allen called it “money in the pocket.”
Source: The Australian
8 Responses
Please tell us, Mr Knox, why the newspapers should be given a free TV licence ?
Sorry?
I don’t subscribe to pay-TV but I’d have to agree with ASTRA on this one.
It does seem to be just the Govt handing out pocket money to the networks who will just continue to cry poor and abuse viewers’ TV screens with intrusive advertising (plus more advertising that they don’t have to count as “advertising” thanks to concessions from ACMA just before Christmas), programming that can’t run to schedule, other programming that can’t stick to a schedule, and presenting advertorials and celebrity cross-promotion as “current affairs”.
I think it was Crikey that remarked that this rebate is being handed out in an election year.
Thanks to the Government, Foxtel have been allowed to run a monopoly for many years now, which has given them protection in the TV industry, and allowed them to build a highly profitable business with Very minimal restrictions on Australian content quotas.
Yes made a comment yesterday regarding this,i would’nt have thought Foxtel would have been happy with this,and there’s the story.Certainly not a even playing field.Surely the Government can’t help year after year it’s got to stop sometime?Will it help there content on the Primary channel no not at all,makes no difference
Bails out the FTA, while allowing Foxtel to keep its paytv monopoly. Class
Maybe it will give them a few bucks worth of change so we can have a full set of FTA channels through the satellite foxboxes, us poor people who miss out on the OneHD/CH9 stuff etc.
On second glance, the FTA’s don’t need a darn bailout. The government should be encouraging competition in the pay sector, to stop making ASTRA looking like it’s Foxtel in disguise. Once you have competition, the FTA’s can levy any fee it wants for carriage, due to the fact that there is no law against carrying local stations.