It’s time to revisit a slow-bake issue we covered at the start of the year – one that is now fully cooked and seeping over the sides of its pan. It’s the innocuously named ‘framework for prominence’. At its core, prominence is about the ease of locating local media content on smart TVs, whether through the positioning of apps on menus that run along the bottom of the screen, or the algorithmic tweaking that brings forth channels and programs in search results.
The issue has been around for a while now. At the end of last year, the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts invited submissions on a proposals paper. Describing prominence in terms of availability, positioning and discoverability, it posed questions about what services any rules should apply to (such as free-to-air TV, ‘BVOD’ services like 9Now and SBS On Demand, or Australian pay TV services) as well as questions about how regulation should be shaped.
The issue has attracted a lot of attention in the past few weeks. As Calum Jaspan explained in the SMH, a brawl has erupted between the Australian free-to-air and pay TV sectors over proposed legislation. The two industry associations, Free TV and ASTRA, have published survey results with different findings on how the public views this issue.
The Free TV/Seven West survey shows very strong support (78%) for the proposition that users should be able to easily locate free TV services. In contrast, a similar larger number of respondents to the ASTRA/Foxtel survey (73%) support the idea that ‘Australians want the ability to customise the order and layout of the apps on their TV themselves’.
The crux of the dispute between Free TV and ASTRA is clear from the additional finding in the Free TV survey that ‘84% of people want to receive a free service option before the paid option'. Both surveys showed low confidence or inclination among viewers to change the presentation of apps pre-installed by manufacturers.
Commentary on the survey showed the free-to-air sector has found a smart way of deploying a long-effective appeal to the nation to support universal access to ‘culturally important content’: ‘to continue creating the moments that unite the nation, Australians have to be able to find it’. ASTRA, meanwhile, has drawn on the spectre of government interference in the private lives of citizens. Its survey found that, ‘When given the choice, 94% of Australians said they don’t want the government controlling the order and layout of the apps on their TV’. A related finding shows the pleasing results that come from asking a question about an indisputable proposition: ‘80% of Australians believe the choice on what they watch should be their own’.
The ASTRA research findings supported a hyperbolic advertisement that warned, ‘THE GOVERNMENT WANTS TO CONTROL YOUR TV’. It was accompanied by a call to support a letter-writing campaign urging people to tell their MPs that, 'This type of regulation goes against what Australia has worked hard to build as a democracy with free markets, freedom of choice and freedom of speech’. The theme has been taken up by Sky News in reports and commentary that emphasise how the legislation will advance the interests of the ABC over its own.
As the tension between the competing industry sectors grows – Sky News and A Current Affair have both dealt themselves into the drama – the Minister has said she intends to introduce legislation as soon as practicable.
Certainly, there are commercial interests at play here. But this kind of regulatory assistance needs to be viewed alongside our continuing expectation that the national broadcasters and the free-to-air commercial networks will fulfil certain public-interest functions that don’t extend to pay TV.
Derek Wilding, CMT Co-Director