MD predicts tough times ahead for public broadcasting

January 2008

SBS Managing Director Shaun Brown told an international conference on public broadcasting this week that the increasing price tag for delivering quality content over new and emerging platforms was one of the major challenges for the industry.

Speaking during a session on innovation at the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association’s all-Commonwealth conference, Mr Brown said it was almost inevitable that public broadcasters, particularly those from smaller nations, would have to look elsewhere than the public purse for the means to survive and prosper.

“It was recently reported that the BBC was giving serious thought to a funding model that would see its licence fee revenue applied only to limited core public service content with other content and services funded by advertising, subscription or other commercial sources,” Mr Brown told the CBA conference.

“If the mother ship of public broadcasting is considering dramatically redefining its funding model then for us smaller players, the writing is on the wall.”

Mr Brown said in a media landscape where audiences are more discerning and requiring ‘on-demand’ services; where Government budgets are increasingly tight while the costs of producing content and running a modern media organisation are growing exponentially, it is ‘unrealistic and self-defeating to constrict public broadcasting by demanding it remain free of commercial revenue’.

“Given the choice between increasing commercial activity or seeing your organisation sentenced to a slow and painful death by irrelevance — well it’s not a choice at all,” Mr Brown said.

“The advocates of the status quo complain loudly but they are not willing to engage in a meaningful debate about the funding crisis facing public broadcasting. In short their thinking is trapped in the same analogue past that defines our funding model.

“Gratifyingly, in this last year SBS has achieved record audience share — 6 per cent*. This demonstrates that audiences, if not critics, value the improved content that increased commercial revenue makes possible.

“Whatever the challenges facing public broadcasting, the survivors will be those organisations which are focused and agile and which have the commercial capability to ride the shifting tides of change.”

*Source: Oztam 5 city metro, 18:00- 23:59, free-to-air viewers 16+, wks 1-52.