Image of the Qld Communications Tower, Paten Rd MOUNT COOT-THA. I always wondered why anyone would build yet another tower on Mt Cooth-tha. You’d think there would be enough for all the various service to find a site somewhere on one of the existing towers.
Aka Communications site B
That site was built by the late Brian Beaumann for his two way radio business. No broadcasters are on there but it has a lot of Brisbane’s taxi’s, and transport operators on it. It was a very well run site last time I was there with the various receive and transmit antenna’s well separated to minimise interference. TxA still have some two-way tennants on their towers but nowhere near the number that the Patton Rd site has.
Would you have a rough date? When it was built?
There are 202 listed licences on the site
https://web.acma.gov.au/rrl/site_search.site_lookup?pSITE_ID=12744
And that has not happened here already?
TV executives view that as ‘acceptable risk’ thesedays, as dollars saved is all that matters now.
I never said cellular. There are other non-broadcast uses for VHF spectrum.
In anycase there will be a collapse of the current 5 DVBT mux’s down to 3 when DVBT2 happens, if it ever will. No wonder owning TV broadcast towers is now so yesterday. BAI especially will lose a huge chunk of revenue when ABC and SBS are migrated to a single shared TV mux.
I’d argue Media Hub already is a cloud provider. If any of that moves off-shore there still needs to be a single point of routing to get video in and out of physical locations in Australia which is where Media Hub will continue to operate.
Also Foxtel is already dabbling with the cloud as Binge and Kayo are encoded and hosted on AWS infrastructure.
Well what else would telcos want a few Mhz of VHF spectrum for? Pagers making a comeback?
Let’s just say they moved playout facilities in the cloud and off-shore to somewhere like India or China.
Some nationalistic dickhead at the playout centre puts out something that praises their country, and goes in unchecked, because, as you’ve said, they’ve saved some dollars by not employing someone to check what gets put to air.
Or, quite possibly, puts hardcore porn on the air because they think it’s funny.
Someone watches it and immediately reports it. The authorities catches wind of this. The channel responsible gets in a lot of trouble. Bad publicity resumes once someone tells the proles that it’s broadcast out of India or China.
If it was anyone other than ACMA, you know, like a real government and a real broadcast regulator that gave a shit, that should be grounds for immediate termination of licensees.
The playout facilities, no matter how automated it is, should be based 100% in Australia for that reason with fallbacks and backups in case it fails.
You can’t make any money if you’re barred from the spectrum because you’re a tightarse who entrusted the wrong people to look after it.
Not sure perhaps late 90’s. As far as I know Brian’s daughter sold the site perhaps to Crown Castle or someone similar. Not sure how he ever got planning approval for it but it would have been a good earner.
BAI will just jack up the fee for the ABC/SBS MUX that stay’s on air - ABC and SBS have both had big budget cuts but the money BAI gets doesn’t change. Outside the capital cities BAI are the only provider so they have a rock solid business model as long as broadcasting stays on air in some form.
Why would Australian broadcasters still need a middleman like Media Hub for routing of live vision in and out of Australia? The likes of ABC, SBS, Seven, Nine and Ten still have production based MCR’s that can perform that function for live studio and OB sources and be IP POI/gateways for overseas playout centres. In some cases an Australian OB can just on-pass it’s IP output direct overseas anyway without the likes of a Media Hub or whatever.
As for Binge, had a look during a free trail, never again. The encoding they use is very poor, same as the washed out and bit rate starved encoding they use for linear transmission, pass.
Probably, but the Govt being the paying customer may take a differing view to that viewpoint. There must have been a huge drop in revenue for BAI when analogue was switched off.
And hardcore porn has not already been broadcast in this country unintentionally or intentionally?
Amazing how much it is hushed up.
BAI had flagged job cuts after the analog switch off but luckily for the staff concerned BA picked up the Network Ten and Southern Cross services so its unlikely the job cuts happened.
As for commercial broadcasters no longer owning transmitters, the jury is out on that one: they seem to be opting for the series of contracts model ie BA, TxA, MediaHub, NPC, NEP, Gearhouse etc. Shouldn’t be a surprise as they have worked that way for years in production with Fremantle, Endemol and others. In Brisbane nothing has been spent at Mt Coot-tha in years and its all sounds very cheap and cheerful.(thank God I am out of it now)
TCN’s tower was an Italian EPT design and the crew that installed it were mostly Italian. EPT (Electrical Power Transmission) usually did electricity stauncheon’s but did bigger jobs like TV as well. A staffer I knew who was there at the time told me Italian was mostly spoken by the crew.
We have all manner of businesses with staff based overseas in developing countries. Banks and telcos for instance would have a much higher risk than a broadcaster so I think you’re overplaying it. The same thing could happen with an disgruntled/planted employee in Australia.
That said, I’m not sure I buy the case for offshoring playout in Australia. We have relatively few feeds compared to the US that are already managed by relatively few staff. The cost of offshoring just a few staff would be too high unless they went into an already established facility.
Big gap between analogue switchoff and Ten jumping from TXA though?
It makes sense if its aligned with the need to upgrade equipment - it also shuffles the expenditure on the balance sheet.
We’ve seen the networks cut costs where ever possible, Seven now do traffic out of the Philippines
TV towers just visible
