The revolution will be televised

TV is evolving so quickly that today's broadcast world could soon look as archaic as that of 1957, above.

With every blink of the eye, it seems, the television industry experiences yet another technology-driven evolutionary moment — digital, HDTV, IPTV, 3D.

On Friday December 4, Australia had its latest moment, when we got our newest free-to-air television station, ABC3. This just-for-the-kids channel broadcasts 15 hours a day, from 6am to 9pm, and brings to 12 the number of free-to-air channels those of us with a digital television or a digital set-top box can receive.

That amounts to a tripling of our free viewing options since 1980, and a doubling since 2005. But it's just the beginning.

The TV broadcasting landscape is evolving at a breathtaking pace, and predictions about what shape it will take are no longer flagged in terms of "soon" but of "now".

It is now possible to watch content streamed from the computer to the television in your lounge room. It is now possible to fill your viewing hours with time-shifted programming so you never have to watch an advertisement unless you choose to. It is now possible to watch content streamed from every corner of the globe to your home, and from one corner of your home to all the others.

Admittedly, you need to be tech-savvy and not too concerned about the legality of what you are doing to take full advantage of many of these possibilities. And you need to have a compliant internet service provider or a massive download cap to carry the bits and bytes that constitute the content.

But, soon, this bold new world will be accessible to all of us, Luddites and early adopters alike. It will be easy, it will be relatively cheap (in some cases free), and it will be legal. And when that happens, television broadcasting as we have known it will have changed forever.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF FREE-TO-AIR TELEVISION in Australia has been a stop-start affair. It took 27 years to get from the first experimental transmissions in Melbourne in September 1929 to the first broadcast to a general audience, also in Melbourne, in September 1956. That same year, three broadcasters — the ABC, Seven and Nine — started up, but it took another nine years for the fourth (the broadcaster that eventually became Ten) to enter the fray, and a further 15 years after that for SBS to emerge in 1980.

Twenty-five years later, ABC2 was launched, after two short-lived experiments in youth broadcasting, ABC Kids and Fly TV, came to an end in 2003.

But suddenly it is moving at a clip. This year alone, new station launches have included Ten's digital sports channel OneHD (March), SBS2 (June), Nine's digital spin-off Go! (August), Seven's 7Two (October) and, now, ABC3. Each of the networks also carries a digital simulcast of its analog transmission, meaning that there are, in effect, 17 free-to-air channels being broadcast (including the community television channel, 31).

The rapid expansion comes as Australia creeps towards a full switch-over to digital-only transmission. The first place in Australia to go fully digital will be Mildura (where digital TV take-up sits at about 70 per cent) early next year, with the capital cities the last to go on December 31, 2013. When that happens, each of the existing networks will have the opportunity to use the freed-up bandwidth for another channel if they so choose.

But perhaps the biggest drivers of change are two sides of the one coin: improvements in technology and the illegal downloading it has allowed.

Massively increased computing power, large, high-resolution monitors, and relatively cheap and fast download rates have turned computers into a major threat to traditional TV broadcasting, both pay and free to air. To save itself, TV is having to become a lot more like the web.

"It's becoming a semantic question whether television is a URL on the internet or the internet is a channel on the television set," says Jeff Cole, a futurist and the director of the Centre for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California. "The key word is convergence."

According to Cole, the old model of television broadcasting is almost irrelevant already. "Teenagers barely understand the concept of watching television on a broadcast network's schedule," he says. "If you talk to them about the days when you used to have a favourite show and you had to be home before it started and you couldn't leave the house until after it aired . . ."

He lets the absurdity of that proposition hang in the air, even though it is the reality that most Australians grew up with. But the ability to record now and watch later — which began with the introduction of the VCR to living rooms in the late 1970s — has fundamentally changed the game. The industry calls it "time-shifting", and it poses a major threat to the business model of free-to-air (FTA) broadcasting.

THE FREE-TO-AIR MODEL relies on a network being able to deliver an audience of a certain size and demographic at a set time. That guarantee allows commercial networks to sell advertising spaces at a set rate — hence the importance of TV ratings. Advertisers are, effectively, buying eyeballs.

But when those eyeballs have the opportunity to record and watch later — at a time when they are less inclined to make grocery-buying decisions, for example — or to fast-forward through the ads entirely, the business model begins to falter.

The problem has become so serious that from December 27, OzTAM, the body that collects ratings figures for the networks, will begin tracking time-shift audience for the first time. Anyone in the ratings sample group who records a program to a personal video recorder (PVR) and watches it within seven days will now be counted as a viewer. In the US, where Nielsen has been tracking time-shift audiences within three days of broadcast, ratings have been boosted by as much as 25 per cent for some programs.

That's great news for the traditional broadcasters. But time-shifting is just one of the fronts on which they are vulnerable.

Video on demand (VOD) is another. Whether legally or illegally, the tech-savvy have been able to search for programming online for years, and download it to watch on their computers. Now, the same service is becoming available in the living room, allowing content to be downloaded (saved to a hard drive) or streamed (played as it is downloaded) over the internet and watched on a television screen.

In the past three weeks alone, Australian viewers have been offered or promised the following innovations on this front: Telstra's T-Box, a PVR that will allow paid content to be streamed or recorded, with downloads from BigPond's libraries unmetered; the ABC iView player, which can now play content on the TV via Sony's PlayStation 3; and a hook-up between iiNet and TiVo to stream free, unmetered content to the television. Each of these will allow viewers to search for the content they want and to watch it when they want.

In America, the shift to viewer-led content management is even more advanced. Hulu — a joint venture between News Corp and NBC — offers subscribers the ability to stream a vast array of content legally and free (for now at least; Hulu is expected to start charging next year). Originally, that content could only be watched on the computer, but software recently released allows it to be relayed to the TV via the PlayStation, X-Box and Wii games consoles. Hulu was launched in 2008 and already has more than 42 million users. In October, it delivered a staggering 856 million downloads, almost twice as many as the preceding month.

According to Martin Walsh, head of digital marketing at IBM Australia, "The Australian TV networks had the opportunity to joint venture to bring Hulu to Australia, but they turned it down."

While they perhaps rue that decision, another US service provider, Netflix — which started life as a mail-order distributor of DVDs but is increasingly delivering content over the internet — is rumoured to be working with TV manufacturers to develop a new set that would eliminate the need for a peripheral device (such as a PVR, game console or computer hard drive) entirely.

Incidentally, these innovations are a nightmare for the DVD rental business too. According to Stephanie Bohn, worldwide head of digital marketing for Warner Bros and a recent visitor to these shores, "Blockbuster has closed around 800 stores in the US in the last couple of months alone".

IN THE NONDESCRIPT OFFICE BLOCK in Port Melbourne that houses Ericsson's Asia Pacific TV Centre, a techspert is talking me through the company's vision of the future. He is demonstrating a set-up that will allow multiple TVs or computers or other devices scattered throughout a household to stream content individually while remaining networked so that each user can send messages to the others — "dinner's ready, come to the table" — or even to keep tabs on the household energy use or grandma's medical records.

As for entertainment, he says, "everything that's ever been made could quite feasibly be stored on servers, for you to download instantly, whenever you want". Taken to its logical conclusion, it's possible that the only thing left for broadcasting as we have have known it will be live events, in particular sport.

Kursten Leins, Ericsson's strategic marketing manager, says of this viewer-led approach to content management: "The vision has been there for a long time. The reality is it's actually happening now."

That reality is called Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV. It is, many believe, where everything is heading, though Leins argues there are significant hurdles ahead.

First up, it won't become a fully realised vision until the national broadband network (NBN) is rolled out — we need fast download rates to make full use of the offerings — and that's at least five years off.

Second, there are issues of governance. "The biggest stumbling block is regulation," Leins says. "At the moment, you have a separate regime for telecommunications and another for broadcasting. When you're talking about the blending of all these services, it's the regulation that will get in the way, not the technology."

But those issues are certain to be resolved because the Federal Government is committed to the digital future. It is the key to giving Australia a "competitive edge", in the Government's view, and will enable cheaper and faster delivery of everything from health care to education.

And, of course, it will also facilitate an explosion of choice in entertainment.

So, with the viewer liberated from the tyranny of the TV programmer, what will become of the networks and pay-TV operators? Will they simply cease to exist?

Maybe, says futurist Jeff Cole. "We're still going to have scheduling for people over the age of 50 or 60, but that's gradually going to diminish. It will go mostly to on-demand."

But Kim Dalton disagrees. The ABC's director of television and chairman of the FTA industry body Freeview says the role of the TV programmer "is a bit like that of the film festival director, who curates the best from around the world. People want the programmers to do that work and to construct a schedule."

Dalton firmly believes there is such a thing as too much choice, and suspects many viewers will greet the prospect of unlimited options with something between horror and paralysis.

Indeed, even Cole admits that most people willingly limit their options in the face of massive choice: "Thirty years ago when there were five to seven channels, 90 per cent of viewing was on three," he says. "Now when there's over 100 channels, 90 per cent of viewing is on six."

According to Dalton: "People don't want to go searching every program that's ever been made to decide what to watch. I think people sit down and think, 'I'm going to watch ABC-TV because they know what is going to appeal to me at the moment and, furthermore, I know a whole lot of other people will be watching it and I'll be able to talk to them about it when I go to work tomorrow morning'.

"Television is a social experience," he adds. "It is a common and shared experience. If you're a fan of Packed to the Rafters, you don't want to watch the whole storyline about Rebecca Gibney and the baby a week later. You want to watch it that night, because part of the experience of the show is talking about it with your friends."

TV IN AUSTRALIA - A BRIEF HISTORY
1929 - first experimental transmissions, in Melbourne
1956 - first public transmission to a real audience, also in Melbourne. Channels 9, 7 and the ABC launched.
1963 - ABC’s first regional stations launched.
1965 - Channel 0 (now Ten) established.
1975 - Full colour transmission begins.
1980 - SBS launched.
2000 - First digital test transmissions.
2001 - Metropolitan stations begin digital broadcasting.
2005 - ABC2 takes to the air.
2009 - Five new channels launched: OneHD, SBS2, Go!, 7Two, and ABC3.
2010 - Mildura will become the first town in Australia to go fully digital.
2013 - Analogue signal turned off, digital transmissions only from midnight December 31.