No musician, writer. artist, producer, broadcaster or distributor was spared from the digital transformation. At the birth of the internet, I was an avid fan of electronic music. For a time, I’d even fancied myself as an electronic musician. I moved quickly to embrace digital music equipment purchasing a DAT deck and an EPS 16 plus digital synthesizer, along with a computer with MiDi composition software. Once I had come to the realisation that I possessed no talent, I was presented with an opportunity to use my computer to hack together some HTML pages for friend who was marketing a local ISP. I at least found my groove coding and quickly enough moved on riding a wave of demand for my skills. This saw Sydney harbour office views, lashings of chardonnay and fancy fish dinners.
But not everyone rode the Internet wave. I have blogged about technology fads here: Will AI lead to a revolution?
I’ve said time and time again people should develop an appreciation of the underlying protocols and process of technologies and overlay them with human behaviour to differentiate between what waves become tsunamis.
The motivation of commercial organisations is simple: To return a profit to the shareholders. Public or State-Owned organisations have much less defined goals, and in most cases nothing other than a vague charter statement. This along with the typical public service employment contracts makes it difficult to hold any such organisations to any performance levels. There simply has not been the motivation for management in any of the public broadcasters to ensure the organisation capitalises on trends and remains relevant. Any attempts to realign these organisations typically sees further losses in viewership as much of their current audiences are legacy viewers and become disenfranchised.
Instead, both the BBC and the ABC have been courting a sector of market that the commercial sector have been less interested in. The far left. These viewers might prefer the ABC and the BBC simply because they do not feature Ads or challenge established social positions. Certainly, they may be prepared to push viewers further in an established direction, for instance, suggest an everyday activity is bad for the environment or your health. It’s important to keep downward pressure on viewers. They will not for instance report positive news such as populations becoming healthier and living longer, unless that is in the context of putting more strain on the environment. The downward pressure is to leverage misplaced Christian guilt. In the end their money will dry up. The UK and Australian governments will have a lot less money to spend and public broadcasting will have far less support from voters. Rising costs of bond related credit and dwindling revenue with constituents at breaking point will see a re-prioritisation of spending. Developed countries like Australia and the UK have quickly growing aged care sector (cost) and are vulnerable to redundancies from AI with their significant administrative workforce (income). It’s unlikely there will be savings from redundancies in the public sector as those people will go on welfare unless they take on front line roles.
Streaming and pay per view.
It is obvious that streaming services are the future and both the ABC and the BBC clearly know this, have platforms in place. From a technical standpoint it would be fairly trivial to put a paywall or enable an advertising service on any of these. The challenge is likely to be from an organisation charter perspective. It’s still eminently fixable. This way anyone who specifically wants to consume ABC & BBC material can do so, and anyone who doesn’t want to won’t have to pay for it. It is deeply disturbing to have your tax funds spent on material that is irrelevant to you, or in some cases, is against your interests. A better approach, focussing on what they do well.
If I were asked, I’d suggest both concentrate on news and entertainment creation and completely withdraw from distribution. Netflix for instance, sees itself as a content creator outsourcing it’s ICT entirely. Although, to be fair, much of their content itself is created by third party production houses, further mitigating risk. Netflix went from startup mode to massive profitability in less than a decade. Critics will say the BBC and the ABC will lose their ability to hold organisations and individuals accountable, in particular governments and elected officials. I’d suggest that’s not their role in an advanced society and the lack of independent income streams would make that difficult. Most people would agree I think that both organisations staunchly support the socialist leaning Labour/Labor parties respectively. Government broadcasters will find it challenging to maintain independence while they have such high operating costs. They will need to remain in somewhat good favour with elected officials artificially raising their importance through advocacy, rather than being a priority for the constituents. I can see a time fast approaching where a combination of superior options for viewers, strained government coiffures and a drop in support for socialist governments will see the subject arise.
The current love fest for altruistic pursuits is falling over as the general population get hit with the higher living expenses from higher costs attributed to diversity, equality and inclusion appointments, energy costs from misguided environmental requirements.
The publicly elected officials that rode the wokeism wave have already lost their shine and in some cases their office. They have help reinforce the conservative adage that socialist governments are poor economic managers. Either way the public broadcasters have made enemies of the conservative and they will have their comeuppance.
There is some question of the legalities and authority to wind down such institutions, but I’d suggest in the face of a significantly tighter economy there will be less resistance than anticipated.