Community Television

There is a 450MHz standard for LTE in some countries, that would be a disaster here.

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They already got caught out on the ‘testing purposes’ excuse. Look at the T2 trial on VHF-10 and UHF-28.

I can just hope that at the next election, LNP get thrown out and replaced with someone who won’t want to remove them off the air.

I’m certainly not suggesting this a valid reason for TVS going off air but the last I checked, UHF-29 (the frequency previously used by TVS for their DVB-T broadcasts from Gore Hill) is actually being used for the current DVB-T2 tests from Kings Cross and Manly/Mosman.

Where I think the future of community TV (or what’s left of it) will get really interesting is if/when we transition to DVB-T2…presumably ACMA may start to think of that by the time we approach 20 years of regular DVB-T broadcasts in Australia.

There’s no reason not to give community TV a portion of the capacity on the DVB-T2 multiplex - a little over 1Mbps would be fine to carry their existing single SD channel in HEVC.

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Yeah. Labor never did community TV any favours either by blocking its transition to digital and even then only granting it a 5 year licence, giving the Libs the opportunity to pull the rug from under them.

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Brisbane’s 31 Digital was a poorly run organisation beset by coups and a lack of vision. If it has the quality of management seen in Adelaide and Melbourne, it would still be on air.

Well said as always @TelevisionAU

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Have they given an indication of what they might do if they win the next election?

my local MP at the time (ALP) said they supported the transition to online in principle

This was from the email I got from them in 2015. I am not sure if their position has changed since then:

We support Community Television going ‘over-the-top’ or using the internet as a distribution platform but the industry needs to be given time and support to ensure the transition is successful.

I hear that The Antenna Awards will return later this year for the first time since 2014. Nice to see them getting more confidence now, such a fucking disaster the Libs tried to pull off, and managing to kill off 31 in Brisbane and Sydney (and almost WTV).

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31 Brisbane did it all by themselves. Moribund organisation.

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Although the uncertainty about the future of community television most likely killed them in the end, it’s probably all but one of the factors that disadvantaged TVS from the very start despite being an otherwise mostly competent (at least from an on-air perspective, not sure how things went behind the scenes though) community TV broadcaster. Others include being perhaps the final TV station in Australia to launch a regular analogue broadcast in 2005/06, not being allowed on Digital TV until 2010, etc.

If like C31 in Melbourne it began broadcasting in the mid-1990s (Sydney had the somewhat amateurish CTS-31 in the original/trial stage of CTV broadcasting, but TVS won the permanent licence in the mid-2000s), I suspect TVS may have tried to hold it out and continue to this day although we’ll probably never quite know the full story about the rise and fall of Television Sydney.

They said they were going to relaunch as an online service in 2015/16 after they closed TV operations. So much for that plan…

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I just don’t see community TV working online - if you’re online you don’t need a linear channel - and no community TV broadcaster is going to make a VOD service better than just putting the stuff on YouTube.

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What’s Hunter TV’s plan of attack? I can see that they stream select events, have on-demand (embedded YouTube) content, and write news. Are they doing much beyond that?

Western Sydney University at Kingswood, where TVS was located, has excellent video and audio production facilities.

https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/humanities_communication_arts/hca/about/facilities

The basis to create a television or radio service exists if they really wanted to, but it seems their interest in broadcasting has long gone (?).

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There isn’t any, the industry knows it, the government has a dislike for community and public broadcasting. Once the signal is switched off, community TV dies.

Community TV is about localism, you can’t remake that online with no money.

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That’s called a normal YouTube channel, nothing really special these days.

Issue is that once CTV is allowed to have one HD / 4K simulcast and one multichannel, it could be revived. The quality of the content is also a bit iffy as well, not faulting the production crew but more money needs to be invested in the sector.

my point. that’s why terrestrial is necessary.

CTV doesn’t need it! Just one SD channel is fine, if they want to share the multiplex - do it but leave them with a SD channel, that’s all they want.

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Necessary for what exactly?

Community TV is about localism, you can’t remake that online with no money.

To continue to be a thing.