Dialogue: State TV issues clamour for action

PAUL NORRIS* says the Government's slow progress on broadcasting could result in Television New Zealand becoming an ageing and costly dinosaur.

What has happened to the Government's broadcasting policy? From the moment when Television New Zealand's plans to fast-forward into the digital era were thrown out last February in the wake of the Hawkesby affair, the Government seems to have been sitting on the pause button.

Its strategy is to work through the various issues in broadcasting in a phased step-by-step approach. Two papers setting the broad objectives have been written by officials.

A paper on a charter for TVNZ is due by the end of the year. Papers on a quota for local programmes and funding options are due sometime next year. Papers on various digital matters are due later this year or early next year. Note that these are papers, not the key decisions the industry is waiting for.

If this turns out to be a one-term Labour Government, it may well have gone before making those key decisions, and the last opportunity to create a broadcasting policy in the public interest will have passed.

The Government says it wants TVNZ to behave more like a genuinely public broadcaster. It wants it to be less arrogant, more responsive to public concerns, less fixated solely on profits and to show more New Zealand programmes.

Broadcasting Minister Marian Hobbs has said that the priority is a charter for the state broadcaster, to be developed with input from the public.

But this deliberate, phased approach carries great risks. The charter cannot be considered in isolation from other major issues clamouring to be addressed. What is the point of setting up an elaborate charter framework for TVNZ - possibly costing millions of dollars of public money - before it has been established what sort of broadcaster TVNZ is to be in the digital age?

The big question is how TVNZ can survive in the future digital world of many channels, fragmenting audiences and revenues, and the expansion of competing services over the internet.

This is not to decry the objectives of public broadcasting. Rather the opposite, because public broadcasters worldwide are wrestling with survival. The conclusion must be that in the digital age, public broadcasting will only be achieved from a position of strength. It will depend on media organisations whose sustained viability is not in question.

In Canada, the CBC has suffered savage cuts in funding, programmes and staff. In Australia the ABC, while much respected, has a market share of under 15 per cent, a figure which some commentators believe is too low for comfort. TVNZ must avoid slipping into the downward spiral of declining audiences and diminishing revenues.

Which is why TVNZ's digital plans, rejected by the Government, were so important to its future. TVNZ was doing what it had to do to compete and survive in the digital environment. It had established a partner in the British cable company NTL and had plans to offer a range of new channels, both pay and free-to-air, interactive services, as well as e-mail and the internet via the television.

The strategy was not dissimilar to that being followed by the BBC, which offers a range of pay TV channels through a joint-venture partner, at the same time as it develops new free-to-air channels for distribution as widely as possible.

The harsh reality is that traditional free-to-air broadcasting is facing declining audiences, with viewers lured away by other choices.

Sky Digital has beaten all projections and now has more than 160,000 subscribers. TVNZ must diversify or die a slow, lingering death. It must find alliances to counter a potential hostile grouping of Sky, TV3, the American Fox TV network and Telecom.

The Government should know this and should expect TVNZ to put up a new version of its digital plan to ministers. What the Government has to decide - better sooner than later - is whether TVNZ should be encouraged to compete with Sky and Telstra Saturn for access to the home through the set-top box, necessary for viewers to receive digital services.

Sky viewers have a Sky box, so the question for the Government is whether to allow TVNZ to develop its own box for its new services or whether to insist that TVNZ accept Sky's offer to carry TVNZ's services on Sky's satellite, received through the Sky box.

Whether TVNZ remains a powerful and successful media organisation may well depend on the answer to that question. New Zealand is such a small market that it may be argued that it makes no sense to have two or three companies all investing heavily in new technology and competing for the small number of potential pay TV subscribers.

However, TVNZ will undoubtedly say that it will not survive if it is restricted to being only a provider of content; that it must control and profit from its own distribution system as well.

TVNZ could also point to the danger of one company having a stranglehold on the all-important gateway to the home, especially a company largely foreign-owned by Rupert Murdoch.

The Hawkesby affair was undoubtedly a setback for TVNZ in its relations with the Government. Since then, it has picked up its game and given clear public indications of its awareness that the Government wants to see real change.

Hence there is talk of bringing back regional news, of a review of children's programmes, of ending the practice of allowing sponsors naming rights to programmes, at least on TV One, and more investment in local programmes, even comedy or drama that New Zealand On Air is unwilling to fund.

This is at least the rhetoric of public broadcasting. If translated into action, there will be a cost, which will have to be met by a reduction in the dividend TVNZ is required to pay to the Treasury. How far the Government is prepared to allow the dividend to fall is another of the crucial decisions on which to date it has been notably silent.

This, however, is a relatively minor issue compared with the long-term future of TVNZ. Unless TVNZ is allowed the scope and freedom to profit from a digital strategy, within a few years there could be minimal dividends and demands for cash to prop up an ageing state-owned dinosaur.

At that point, the fact that it was behaving like a public broadcaster with a charter would seem small stuff indeed.

* Paul Norris, a former TVNZ senior executive, heads the New Zealand Broadcasting School at Christchurch Polytechnic.