Tom O'Regan

Making cultural policy: Meeting cultural objectives in a digital environment

Policy makers face a number of difficulties meeting the traditional cultural and social objectives of broadcasting and film policy development in a rapidly changing digital environment. This new environment requires broadcasting policy and film policy alike to substantially adjust their settings to “speak to” new governmental, industry, and political priorities. Broadcasting and film policy-making frameworks now need to adjust to policy and industry settings stressing the knowledge economy and information society. This both creates a new centrality for audiovisual production as a “content creation” industry and raises new problems for the various local film and television production ecologies (including the cultural policy that has sustained them) that have developed. This article will use Australian developments to suggest ways broadcasting and film policy is both making and not making this adjustment.

The Film Producer as the Long-stay Business Tourist: Rethinking Film and Tourism from a Gold Coast Perspective

Abstract Studies of the connection between film and tourism have tended to foreground film-induced tourism whether as a consequence of films being made in particular locations or as arguments for encouraging film production activity in a particular location. In both cases film production is seen to be beneficial for the ancillary benefits it creates in terms of destination awareness. In this article, however, we suggest that film-induced tourism is a somewhat limited way of perceiving the relationship between film production, tourism and place. By focusing on the example of the Gold Coast, we argue that the provision of film and television production services to ‘footloose’ producers is approached here as a form of tourism alongside other niche tourism markets. In this context, film production becomes another tourism business segment to be pitched to, catered for, with special requirements that need to be met. Furthermore there are significant synergies between tourism and the servicing of international film production, beyond film-induced tourism. This is apparent in the sharing of expertise and infrastructure; in the way that place identities as tourist destinations are critical to the branding of places as production locations; for the opportunities presented by significant tourism and leisure economies for retaining a flexible workforce that can accommodate the fly-in-fly-out nature of film and television production. It is our argument that where the Gold Coast is concerned, tourism has been a central partner in the development of the Gold Coast as a greenfield production location.

Rating the Audience : the Business of Media

Knowing, measuring and understanding media audiences have become a multi-billion dollar business. But the convention that underpins that business, audience ratings, is in crisis. Rating the Audience is the first book to show why and how audience ratings research became a convention, an agreement, and the first to interrogate the ways that agreement is now under threat. Taking a historical approach, the book looks at the evolution of audience ratings and the survey industry. It goes on to analyse todays media environment, looking at the role of the internet and the increased difficulties it presents for measuring audiences. The book covers all the major players and controversies, such as Facebooks privacy rulings and Googles alliance with Nielsen. Offering the first real comparative study, it will be critical for media students and professionals.

TV as cultural technology: The work of Eric Michaels

Stories about technology play a distinctive role in our understanding of ourselves and our common history.… technology is thoroughly cultural from the outset: an expression of the very outlooks and aspirations we pretend it merely demonstrates.

Experimenting with the Local and the Transnational: Television Drama Production on the Gold Coast

For the last 40 years the dominant framework for understanding Australian television has been via its contribution to national identity. Australian television drama has been no exception—it has been unambiguously national in its outlook with its international successes historically predicated on identifiably Australian storytelling and settings in series like Neighbours, Skippy, Home and Away and Flying Doctors (Cunningham & Jacka, 1996). Yet for the high end of this television drama since the mid-1990s this strategy of using locally oriented production to achieve both local success and international circulation has been increasingly undermined by fragmenting audiences, declining production funds, and increased competition within traditional export markets. Retrospectively we can see that the central problem facing local television production, particularly film and television drama production, over that decade has been one of how to manage for these new configurations: how to internationalize local film and television production in order to retain and hopefully build market shares; and how to develop new models of financing that combine both local and foreign sources. And for some production organizations (e.g. Grundy, and more recently Beyond International) this entailed asking whether it was necessary to shift focus to other low-cost forms of television content altogether, thereby abandoning drama production, and/or to move offshore, establishing production

From Multimedia to Digital Content and Applications: Remaking Policy for the Digital Content Industries

This article analyses the two policy moments of digital content industries policy development of the Keating (1992–96) and Howard (2001–04) governments. In bringing these two moments into dialogue, our aim is to illuminate and evaluate the broader policy frameworks, and the political and policy contexts, which gave rise to and subsequently shaped these different digital content strategies. The Keating government connected culture and services to harness multimedia as a vehicle for cultural expression and as a new economically viable growth industry suited to a convergent information age. The Howard governments innovation agenda has reconstructed industry development priorities for the digital content industries, influencing their conception as inputs and enablers for both the ICT and broader industries in an information economy framework. The article concludes with an evaluation of the assumptions and priorities, shortcomings and advantages of these two quite different approaches to developing digital content industries.

The politics and practice of television ratings conventions: Australian and American approaches to broadcast ratings

As we now know, once you introduce audience ratings, as China has done, you have not just introduced ‘a measure’; you have introduced a huge apparatus that brings with it certain types of agreements, values and behaviours. No doubt, Chinas leaders saw the ratings as a neutral mechanism in mapping broadcast audiences. The history of ratings, however, is quite the opposite. It is a set of standards, values and conventions that drives particular kinds of expectations in organizations, technology and content. Audience ratings first provided a coordination rule for advertiser-supported media and then became a convention, harnessed by TV to change media economics. In this paper the authors provide an insight into how audience ratings, as a convention – a compact – emerged in Australia and America, and some of the major differences between them.

Locomotives and stargates: Inner-city studio complexes in Sydney, Melbourne and Toronto

This article examines the place of large studio complexes in plans for the regeneration of inner‐city areas of Sydney, Melbourne and Toronto. Recent developments in each city are placed in the context of international audiovisual production dynamics, and are considered in terms of the ways they intersect with a range of policy thinking. They are at once part of particular urban revitalisation agendas, industry development planning, city branding and image‐making strategies, and new thinking about film policy at national and sub‐national levels. The article views studio complexes through four frames: as particular kinds of studio complex development; as “locomotives” driving a variety of related industries; as “stargates” enabling a variety of transformations, including the remediation of contaminated, derelict or outmoded land controlled by public authorities or their agents close to the centre of each city; and as components of the entrepreneurial, internationally oriented city.

GLOBALISATION FROM WITHIN? THE DE-NATIONALISING OF AUSTRALIAN FILM AND TELEVISION PRODUCTION

Saskia Sassen argues that globalisation is taking place deep inside countries and ‘institutional domains that have largely been constructed in national terms’. This type of globalisation is localised to ‘national’ and ‘subnational’ settings, but is reorienting them towards global agendas and systems. The result is an unremarked de-nationalising of national policy domains, processes, activities and instruments. In this article, we argue that these globalising and de-nationalising processes are radically reshaping contemporary Australian film and TV production, and the terms and policy settings under which it is developed and monetised.

Remembering Video: Reflections on the First Explosion of Informal Media Markets through the VCR

Informal cultural markets are not new. Nor are “pirate” video and software markets as different from formal markets as supposed. They are also markets governed by pricing, providing opportunities for leverage by market participants at the expense of each other. Pirate markets are a variant of a cultural market in which returns for sellers and costs to buyers factor in limited to no formal returns to content owners. Furthermore, in large parts of the world, such informal arrangements facilitate cultural, social, and market participation. This article remembers the disruptions that accompanied the VCR’s introduction to identify longstanding pathways of market formation to which the VCR and our current “digital” ensemble of DVD and downloads conform; and those features common to these and other media technologies which lend themselves to diverse production, distribution, and consumption arrangements globally.