So, one fine day soon we will be able to watch exactly what we want on TV. Thanks to impending technological advances, our living-room TV will act like a computer, letting us access an almost limitless array of visual material. Think YouTube in your living room.
You will be able to satisfy your compulsion to see the innovative, misunderstood final episodes of Chances or that perfect last quarter your team played a decade ago.
Someone somewhere will share your kooky tastes and possess the weird media fossil you covet. The brave new media ecology of audience-driven megadistribution, and, god forbid, maybe even high-speed broadband access, will get it for you, pronto. Search and play. Bless them, the web's subversive, anti-corporate, open-source, peer-to-peer, file-sharing, radical do-gooders.
Television's exact future is unpredictable because of the proliferation of competing options for its delivery. Media companies are striving to ensure the content they pay for continues to generate revenue. Committed individuals and foundations are decentralising content sharing so that no one entity can control access to programs. The audience is sharing shows with as much glee (and disdain for copyright) as they did with music and short video clips.
The idealist, cheapskate, lazy everyman and anarchist are strangely aligned against those who would restrict programming. But the enemy is also the provider of much of the planet's most beloved content. The only thing agreed on universally is that future delivery models will have to maximise choices and access for viewers.
But what of the sports fan? If you are into curling or caber tossing, you will have greater access to material of interest. But for fans of major sports, traditional networks will continue to provide live programming.
The infrastructure and expertise necessary to broadcast a sport like footy from a major stadium is limited to the established operators whose future prosperity may depend on specialising in such live events as news and mainstream sport. Most useful innovations for viewers, if and when they finally reach these shores, will be opening up access to already completed programs.
In the short-term, rabid AFL fans who like to rush home after a good win to soak in the televised version of their team's triumph may find Foxtel's set-top box, which enables you to record and play back live events, a useful if expensive option.
But, on the whole, we will remain at the mercy of programmers.
The recently departed and much mourned Fox Footy Channel was the historical high-water mark of AFL coverage. Diehard fans are now not nearly as spoilt. Live coverage remains excellent on Foxtel but recent replays were disfigured by brutal and clumsy editing into 90-minute highlight packages and they are no longer as conveniently scheduled. Bonus programs that really mattered, such as Jason Bennett's wonderful Headliners series, are no more.
I want to see the matches in full, first and foremost. I would settle for fewer panel discussions featuring newspapermen rehashing what they wrote in their columns and discussed on their radio spots. But others love those shows. The beauty of the telecommunications future is that more people's desires will be met. Sub-cultures will presumably thrive and variety and diversity will flourish.
All the same, it seems the more technologically connected people become, the more they feel the urge to congregate publicly. Live sport is booming and if people can't attend, they watch on TV, in numbers still relevant to advertisers.
Modern sports coverage is a lot more comprehensive than a generation ago. Compare the number of cameras and statistics in any footy telecast to Channel Seven's Big League from the 1970s. There are so many advances we take for granted.
But modern media consumers are fussy. They pay a lot, expect a lot and know overseas consumers get better services.
Already Australians with broadband sit at their computer more than in front of their TV. We are among the world's most enthusiastic users of bit-torrents, which enable the downloading of films and TV shows. Australians embrace whatever changes come.
AFL fans, however, should be wary about what they wish for in this evolving broadcast environment. Our clubs, and our sport, rely to an alarming extent on the need for traditional networks to broadcast popular mainstream sports.
Many things are going to change, soon, but those of us who love a one-nation sport that relies on a network television industry facing a revolution might be advised to put up with some shortcomings and count our blessings.
Media Man Australia Profiles
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