On Wed, 22 May 2013, Aryan Ameri <info@ameri.me> wrote:
The ABC and SBS produce nothing that is of interest to me.
There are many government funded organisations that do nothing of interest to me. But that is not relevant to the issue of whether they should be funded. The relevant issues are whether they provide benefits to large portions of the population, to people who are missing out in other ways, and whether they generally do enough good to be worth the price. The ABC and the SBS drive the local film industry which gives significant economic benefits to Australia. The ABC provides a lot of educational children's content which would either be entirely missing if there was only commercial TV or would have grossly excessive commercials which distract from the point of the programs and make parents want to avoid them. The SBS caters to minority groups that don't have their interests represented well in other areas - for example a significant fraction of Melbourne's population is of Greek ancestry but only the SBS provides shows in Greek on free TV.
I get my news from Reuters and Quartz and NY Times and Atlantic and the Economist and a few other sources. They all have websites that give me "world news" that I care about. Reuters and Quartz are free and ad-supported and I pay for NY Times and Economist monthly. There is no shortage of quality news sources on the web, free or paid.
There is also no shortage of people who don't want their news on the web, such as most elderly people. There are even LUV members who don't want to own a smart-phone - we had a discussion about this at the last Beginner's SIG meeting!
I get my TV by paying $8 for netflix, which gets me all the TV shows and movies that I could ever want to watch. And when I want "intelligent documentaries", I go to the Smithsonian, or watch some TED Talks.
http://www.si.edu/ I've just quickly browsed the above site and didn't see the documentaries, could you please point me to them. I agree that TED talks are great and there are also a lot of good educational shows on Youtube, sites such as topdocumentaryfilms.com and others. But I think that TV still has a lot to offer. For example we had a discussion on the LUV lists recently about someone who couldn't download a DVD image because of their remote location. Anyone who can't download a DVD image once every year when a new Linux distribution is released certainly can't spend 30 minutes a day watching TV shows downloaded from the Internet!
Now my taste is my own and not everyone shares my taste, but in this modern world there is this thing called the Internet, which amazingly has something for everyone, whatever their taste! The "public broadcaster" argument used to be valid when the BBC and ABC and the likes initially started, but the nature of broadcast has changed and there is no justification for their subsidised existence anymore.
Of course the ABC provides a lot of content on the Internet. We have had a discussion on the LUV lists about the python-iview program which is unfortunately not being supported due to stupid ABC lawyers but which however still works really well. SBS also provides a similar service to ABC iView, I hope it works well because I just missed Mythbusters... When the ABC iView service gets more viewers than free to air TV and when almost all the population has the ability to download large video files then I think we can have a discussion about cancelling the ABC and SBS free to air services. But until the NBN roll-out is complete I don't think we should even discuss it. Also given that the Liberal party wants to cancel the NBN I don't think that they are in a position to withdraw funding from the ABC or the SBS. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/