[LINK] Alson and streaming video and audio

[Frank O'Connor]

Got dual passport rights myself, Bob ... Irish and Australian. Way 
useful when travelling in Europe. :)

To my way of thinking the ABC and SBS are responsible for their own 
future. The ABC is doing a few good things IP wise, and SBS is 
starting to come on board with some good stuff. Both are reasonably 
forward looking organizations, both have a high degree of 
consumer/viewer credibility (in both Oz and overseas), and both seem 
to have the knowledge, vision and wherewithal to rapidly convert 
their operations to the new media when it becomes necessary. The one 
restricting factor is the government/ABA's head-in-the-sand attitude 
to the new realities and their control over those two bodies ... but 
with a reasonably cost efficient investment either would be players 
in the new environment relatively fast.

In general I welcome the changes that will come from IP and IT. It 
will be possible for a lot more competitors to compete in the 
'broadcasting environment' without the need for huge capital outlays 
and start-up costs, programming will have to get a hell of a lot more 
creative and higher quality to hold our interest, the fact that there 
will be a huge number of players means a hell of a lot more diversity 
in content and editorial.

There are naturally a few things to be ironed out, but they won't be 
ironed out by the ABA or the Australian government ... they'll be 
ironed out by bodies like the UN and the OECD.

				Regards,

At 11:33 AM +1000 on 19/6/00 you wrote:
>frankoconnor@ozemail.com.au (Frank O'Connor) wrote
>>To me the ABA is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the face of
>>technological change. If one looks at little bunnies like IPv6 and
>>multi-casting, the increasing tendency for consumers to acquire more
>>bandwidth, data satellite developments due over the next couple of
>>years (TeleDesic etc), increasing numbers of non-Australian IP
>>suppliers (BT, WorldCom etc), multimedia encoding and compression
>>techniques (MP2, 3 & 4), simple IP enabled 'set top'; box technology,
>>and the like ... in a few years I should have no problems watching my
>>Tanzanian originated agricultural soap operas every day whatever the
>>Australian Broadcasting Authority says.
>>
>>To my mind, we should let them have their fun and propose whatever
>>damn regulations they want. The fact is that they'll ultimately be
>>unworkable, unenforceable and will end up making the 'few, the happy
>>few' who have traditionally held broadcasting licenses privileges in
>>this country more and more irrelevant and peripheral to what the
>>mainstream consumer is doing.
>>
>>They've been advised on a number of occasions how the IP changes
>>things, but nobody there seems to want to drag their heads out of the
>>bureaucratic sand ... and I for one have no intention of wasting any
>>more time on them.
>>
>				Regards,
>
>I agree with the sentiments Frank makes in this email. However, if we
>take this position than organisations providing a valuable service to
>Australia, like the ABC and SBS may be marginalised and eventually
>disappear altogether. Who will then prvide the equivalent service?
>
>I don't believe we can wait for the regulation to become
>meaningless., Australia will have missed the boat by then and it'll
>be a long, hard and costly swim to catch up. Sure, we can go offshore
>with our streaming services, but again, altruistically, this does not
>benefit Australia.
>
>bobj
>
>(I should confess here that I'm not an Australian but a European who
>clings tenaciously to a European passport because it gets me in
>everywhere except Australia without a visa. However, my heart's in
>the right place ------- somewhere along the Boulevard St Michael in
>Paris [oh, if only])