Television

Last Friday I went down to Sydney to attend and speak at the ABC Digital Media Forum, an internal conference exploring innovative possibilities for the national broadcaster especially in the user-led online environment. The ABC is doing pretty well in this field already, and from what I saw at the conference, there are plenty more exciting projects in the pipeline - some of these remain firmly under wraps before they're officially launched, though, so I won't mention them here.

My own contribution was to a session exploring the potential of embedding produsage-based models within the ABC framework, and I've already …

Boston (with apologies to Kent Brockman).
So, over the last few days I've found myself inadvertently in the centre of some degree of controversy in the online Battlestar Galactica fan community. This was sparked by my report from the BSG panel at MiT5 last weekend. People more closely aligned with that fan community have posted some very insightful thoughts here on my blog, but in the meantime the discussion has moved over to where I think it properly belongs - the Battlestar Wiki blog. Additionally, audio and video from the original presentations has also been posted. I wish the community well in deliberating the implications of the papers presented at MiT5, and in its outreach endeavours to female fans of BSG. As a BSG fan myself (going right back to the movies several eternities ago, much as it pains me to admit this) I'm also likely to drop in to the wiki every once in a while to see how it's developing - it would be nice to see a few more spoiler warnings for those of us in televisionally challenged regions who haven't yet succumbed to bittorrenting the whole lot, though! (In fact, the BSG wiki reminds me quite a bit of the Perry Rhodan wiki I mentioned here a while ago - here's hoping that the BSG series in its new incarnation will be blessed with a similarly lengthy run...)

Boston.
There's a whole panel on Battlestar Galactica here at MiT5 - how could I resist? Melanie E. S. Kohnen is the first speaker, presenting on Battlestar Galactica and the Reimagination of Contemporary American History. She begins by noting the connections between the BSG story of a surprise attack on the twelve colonies, and the 9/11 attacks (although strictly speaking, in a full analogy, it would have been only the people within the Twin Towers who had survived). Different from the black-and-white positioning of the U.S. adminstration, however, the question of who is on which side is problematised strongly within BSG; it is almost impossible to determine who is human and who is Cylon in the BSG story. Melanie now describes the BSG scenario after settlement on New Caprica, where humans under Cylon rule are caught between collaboration and resistance (through suicide bombings and other oppositional actions) - this is personified in the opposition between Baltar and Roslin in the show.

Lee Burton and Peter Maggs from the Australian Children's Television Foundation are the next keynote speakers at ATOM 2006, speaking on the children's television debate. The Australian Communications and Media Authority's current review of children's television standards provides a backdrop to this debate. They begin by showing a brief video of kids' statements of what thye'd like to see on TV - perhaps in the form of a dedicated kids' TV channel...

Peter now notes the long history and conflicted future of the ACTF. Government requirements call for 260 hours of C and 130 hours of P programming; within this C quota, Australian TV channels must show a total of 32 hours of first-run children's drama (financed usually around 30% with txpayers' money). However, such shows are invcreasingly shown at times when the intended audience isn't around - kids typically aren't home at 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon, for example. Daytime programming is largely filled with U.S.- and Japanese-made animation, which is often provided to channels free of charge and makes its money through selling related merchandise. In the afternoon, on the other hand, the 4 p.m. timeslot is filled with locally-made shows competing for the same audience, even though the audience isn't likely to be home yet. This could be seen as a waste of taxpayers' money. On the other hand, the audience figures for kid watching TV peak between 5 and 10 p.m. - along with primetime for other demographics.