Screen Development Australia (SDA), the national screen industry network representing independent Australian content producers, have welcomed the Labor Party’s vision and clear-sighted understanding of the new wave of global communications opportunities in committing to a comprehensive broadband infrastructure plan for Australia. SDA however remains concerned that the policy doesn’t go far enough and address some key issues that have been raised by the screen development sector.
SDA Chair Kerry O’Rourke today said, ‘The film television, games and new media industries in this country will slip backwards rapidly in terms of productivity and global competitiveness without a real broadband architecture. The Labor Party is to be congratulated for planning to move Australia so strongly in this direction, but broadband, crucial as it is, is just plumbing. The missing piece in this future-setting goal is the content and the access Australian content producers will have to the latest high-end technology to tell Australian stories. What product will flow through this plumbing? Whose stories do we want to be channelled via the internet to Australian audiences and the rest of the world?’
SDA have designed a HD (High Definition) and multiple-platform infrastructure proposal mapped to complement the new broadband-based entertainment and communications landscape that has received in-principle support from both the Coalition and Labor. The SDA proposal focuses on preparing current and future generations to tell their stories at global standards, ensuring their access to contemporary platforms.
‘Despite the strong support we have received for our infrastructure proposal, to date neither Labor nor the Coalition have prioritised, as part of their election platforms, the SDA proposal as an integral part of a complete strategy to ensure Australia has a future as a content provider,’ says Mr O’Rourke.
‘Without infrastructure support for high definition content production the digital infrastructure programs and policies of any future Australian government will be critically incomplete,’ says O’Rourke. ‘The danger of just building the architecture and plumbing for broadband is that it will have to be filled with content from other cultures, other societies, other industries, and that will leave our professionals out in the cold,’ says Mr O’Rourke. SDA also points to the urgency of the planned switch-over to universal HD broadcast by around 2011, and the fact that all networks globally have already moved to demand professional HD product as a bottom-line delivery format.
SDA says its HD and multiple-platform infrastructure funding is cutting edge in its design as well as self-sustaining.
O’Rourke says ‘The SDA centres are key sources nationally of the very content which will flow through the broadband infrastructure. Importantly, this content comes from the generations both entering and consolidating their careers as content producers.’ SDA urge both Labor and the Coalition to recognise this critical omission in their policy settings and election commitments to date, and put the right tools in the hands of those organisations helping the Australian content producers of the future.
[release from Metro Screen]