Communications regulator ACMA launched its newest report on industrial tv manufacturing final week. Buried within the report was a dramatic factoid: industrial broadcasters have fully stopped making kids’s tv.
Damaged down by class, ACMA confirmed that the industrial networks had spent the spherical whole of $0 on kids’s drama in 2022-23. Grownup drama can be on the slide, right down to $49 million from $65 million a 12 months earlier. Nonetheless, spending to supply sport programming rose.
The report reveals the devastating penalties of the Coalition’s resolution to take away native content material quotas for youngsters’s tv in 2021. Spooked by the pandemic, and lobbied closely by the free-to-air networks, then communications minister Paul Fletcher eliminated the youngsters’s content material manufacturing requirement originally of 2021. The variety of hours of domestically produced kids’s TV reveals has dropped by 80%, from greater than 600 hours to lower than 100.
Everybody is aware of concerning the world phenomenon Bluey. Consequently, dad and mom and politicians might imagine the whole lot is okay within the native kids’s manufacturing scene. However in some ways, the success of Bluey has papered over looming issues. There isn’t as a lot native kids’s tv being made, and in an age of gadgets, many children at the moment are being left alone with tablets to surf doubtful content material on YouTube.
QUT Professor of digital media and cultural research, Anna Potter, advised Crikey that the tip of youngsters’s tv manufacturing by industrial broadcasters was “completely predictable.”
With no regulatory requirement to supply such content material, Potter defined, there isn’t a industrial incentive to make it.
“When you’re working a industrial broadcaster and also you’re solely inquisitive about revenue, it makes whole sense,” she mentioned in a cellphone interview. Furthermore, most of the reveals industrial networks have been making weren’t widespread. “Children weren’t watching them.”
Potter and her colleagues at QUT have simply revealed a analysis report that paints a bleak image of Australian display screen content material in recent times.
The report reveals that Australian tv drama is in serious trouble. “Hours of Australian tv drama launched every year by all channels and companies declined considerably between 1999 and 2023,” the authors write. “Grownup drama fell from 570 to 300 broadcast hours, and youngsters’s drama greater than halved, from 106 to 51 hours.”
Streaming video platforms like Netflix and Stan aren’t doing a lot kids’s content material both. With industrial channels getting out of native manufacturing altogether, that leaves the ABC as basically the “solely sport on the town” on the subject of new kids’s reveals.
However the ABC is rebranding its ME channel to a comedy and light-weight leisure format, to be referred to as ABC Entertain, within the course of slimming down from two children channels to at least one (rebranded as ABC Household).
And this week the information broke that storied children govt Libbie Doherty is leaving the ABC. Doherty’s tenure was notable for greenlighting Bluey, in addition to indigenous cult basic Little J and Massive Cuz, teen drama First Day, and Beep and Mort. Doherty is without doubt one of the best-regarded commissioning executives within the business, with a number of Emmys, Logies and ACTAs in her cupboard. Dropping her will likely be a tough blow for the community.
Potter questions whether or not the ME rebrand and the departure of Doherty are related. “The transfer to ABC Entertain suggests to me they’re reallocating assets away from devoted kids’s content material,” she advised Crikey.
The ABC stays the largest commissioner of youngsters’s content material in Australia. A spokesperson for the nationwide broadcaster advised us that the rebrand is about catering to school-aged kids. “They’re digital natives who need their content material on demand and almost all the time by way of a digital platform.” All ABC ME content material will likely be accessible on iView. “The ABC is dedicated to sustaining its spend on kids’s content material on the ranges set at 1 July 2023,” they added.
Whereas the ABC is holding the fort, the broader coverage settings for Australian content material clearly aren’t working.
The QUT report blames policymakers, who’ve “overwhelmingly prioritised the pursuits of display screen industries”, however did not “safeguard provides of distinctively Australian tv drama with cultural and social worth for the Australian neighborhood.” Paul Fletcher later admitted he had angered the youngsters’s tv sector with the quota cull. Presumably the industrial broadcasters have been comfortable, although.
Content material quotas are an efficient coverage software for governments — as may be seen when they’re eliminated. As Display Producers Australia’s Matthew Deaner advised TV Tonight’s David Knox, “till there may be extra balanced regulation of economic broadcasters and the more and more dominant streaming platforms, nothing will change for Australian youngster audiences.”
