At the start of 2000, SBS began again to look towards the future.
A New Media division, responsible for the SBS website, was established.
By 2005, the then-head of SBS Radio, Quang Luu, was well into preparations to carve a place for SBS in Australia's digital radio network, which began broadcasting digital services on six channels in August 2009.
Controversially, he said his vision for SBS digital included a new national frequency which would broadcast entirely in English.
“The English network is important to the extent that I've always argued there are around three million Australians from a second, third or fourth generation- born to migrants and refugees - and are not catered for. So they are a potential listenership for SBS Radio to try and bring into the market,” Mr Luu said.
SBS' World View
SBS' particular world view enabled it to win broadcast rights for the Catholic World Youth Day in 2008.
Then-federal Communications Minister, Senator Helen Coonan, said the multicultural broadcaster was best-placed to broadcast the international event.
“It will be an enormous advantage for SBS to be able to broadcast in many different languages to reach different groups who otherwise might feel marginalised if you didn't have this kind of diverse broadcasting of the event. We thought that in terms of being the free to air broadcaster, SBS was a stand-out.”
Highest honour
In 2009, SBS became the first institution to receive East Timor's highest honour, the Medal of Merit.
Awarded for service to humanity, the citation says for the past three decades, SBS has been a voice of democracy, freedom, justice and truth that otherwise would remain unheard.
East Timorese president Jose Ramos-Horta said he depended on SBS news when he lived in Sydney as exiled spokesman for the resistance against Indonesian rule.
“I used to watch SBS from home in Liverpool, and it was my preferred news, in terms of quality, of independence and neutrality, but also sensitivity. SBS always gave more coverage to the human stories out of Bolivia, out of Peru, or Africa.”
Restoring independence to SBS and the ABC - that was a promise of the Rudd government in October 2009, as vacancies appeared on the boards of the public broadcasters.
For too long, the government declared, the process of appointment of SBS and ABC board members had been open to political interference.
Two new board members were selected by an independent panel: Sydney-based businessman Mr Joseph Skrzynski and former Ethiopian television journalist, Elleni Bereded-Samuel.
They both have firm ideas on SBS' future direction.
Future direction
Mr Skrzynski says SBS isn't just a resource for non-English speakers - it's a tool for all Australians to understand each other.
“Because of our multilingual, multicultural community, I think it's really important that we have some channel for Chileans to understand Afghanis(sic). Its not just about Australians, if by that we mean Anglo-Saxons understanding Greek, Italians and then the Asian wave and the Middle Eastern wave, it is about all those groups to each other as well as well.
“I'm just fascinated this is a unique organisation anywhere in the world because it has so many niches to try to appeal to, and has an extraordinary complex political task to keep everyone happy, so it's a great challenge and great challenges appeal to me,” Mr Skrzynski said.
Our greatest challenge
Ms Bereded-Samuel believes the greatest challenge facing SBS is keeping up with the changing shape of the Australian community.
But she says at the moment, SBS is not reaching its full potential as an information source for non-English-speaking Australians.
“SBS does not have adequate resources to be able to meet the needs of the various communities. What's happening is that the community dynamic is changing and every time there is new arrivals, and also the established community are aging and becoming more needy in terms of information.
The more they get older they lose their English language and go back to their original language,” Ms Bereded-Samuel says.
And the Managing Director of SBS, Shaun Brown, began saying publicly in 2009 that the broadcaster was failing to meet its multilingual objectives.
He repeated his message in a speech to the Australian Broadcasting Summit in March this year, explaining his reasons to World View afterwards.
“It's not a new message; it's one I've been saying for some years now. It's a specific area - in-language services as opposed to multicultural services. I think, in the area of telling more Australian stories, particularly on television, we've done quite well in recent years.
But the issue of under-serving both large language groups and newly arrived high-needs groups is one that's been evident for many years and SBS is struggling, frankly, to find a way to resolve it,: Mr Brown said.
Joseph Skrzynski agrees the changing shape of Australia's migrant communities means that SBS will also have to continue to evolve.
New languages, new technologies
He says keeping up with the SBS audience involves more than adding new languages, it also means adding new technologies.
“Whether it's a newspaper, a radio station, a television broadcaster. All of them have to grapple with the way audiences reach their entertainment and their information, and sitting down in front of a television set is not something people under 25 are doing a lot of these days.
That's just fact. So if you're interested in maintaining your reach you have to be interested in the way technology reaches people for you,” Skrzynski says.
Mr Brown also says digital technologies are the most obvious keys to resolving the broadcaster's dilemma, with digital radio, online content and multi-channelling on digital TV.
But he says SBS' funding allocations under the Rudd federal government have been disappointing.
"There are new language groups who deserve to be on SBS radio, but the only way they can get on, is if others step off.
So every year that you don't address that issue, you progressively make it even worse. I understand the history of that and I can understand how difficult it was to confront, but the fact is that digital technology allows us to do that in a way that there need not be losers.” Brown said.
Needs of migrant communities
The chairman of the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils, Pino Migliorino, agrees that SBS needs to adapt to the changing needs of migrant communities.
“The reality is there are some groups that are quite large and in the ascendancy and it makes sense to market to them. But at the same time, given that SBS is a public broadcaster, it should be looking at those groups who have no media infrastructure other than what SBS can provide.
“I'm talking about the new arrivals like the Somalis and people from Sierra Leone- language groups that if SBS doesn't provide those services, there's no active conduit to get services to them,” Mr Migliorino said.
Greek broadcaster Alex Catharios was working at SBS when the first broadcasts aired in 1975.
He says his language group is a reflection of the way the audience is changing.
“Since 1974-75, migration from Greece has largely stopped because we are a member of the European economic market and people don't migrate easily any more.
Therefore the neeeds of the programme have changed immensely and now we have reached a stage where the majority of people from a Greek background are born here in Australia. So we have to take care of the new situation.”
Arabic language contribution
Ms Majida Abbood, from the Arabic programme, is also adapting to a changing audience, many of whom are not the ones who were listening to her back in 1975.
“We're very much interested in their children and grandchildren and the wider Australia. We hope to build on the wealth of 35 years of experience of distinctly Australian, multicultural and multilingual content, because SBS radio is at the heart of the media goldmine in Australia.
We're at the heart of the great potential for content to be offered to all beyond the language and beyond the platform,” Ms Abbood said
Language hub development
Mr Brown says the immediate future lies with the development of what SBS is calling online Language Hubs.
“For somebody, say, speaking Hindi or Arabic, they can go to a single location on the SBS website and through that point of contact, connect with everything we do on radio and television, but also - and importantly - a whole raft of new content that's accessed and made available specifically for online delivery.
“Then the third part of that is to lay a platform on which people can confidently place their own user-generated content, their own coverage of their events, so that everybody can share - from within that group and from outside that group - can share in the experience they have here in Australia,” Mr Brown said.
Mr Brown says SBS will remain relevant as long as the Charter remains in its present form.
He says the SBS Charter has always demanded -- and continues to demand -- that the broadcaster fill two key requirements for Australians.
“We service all Australians - our Charter requires us to do that. It creates a setting, an environment, of inclusiveness, a general understanding across the whole population of what diversity and multiculturalism means and why it's critical that we embrace it,” Mr Brown said.
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