Australia’s TV media shifting towards digital TV, industry players unsure how to take advantage of trend
Research and Markets, the world's largest market research resource provider, has released its latest report entitled: "Australia - Digital Entertainment and Media Market," which provides a comprehensive look into the country's digital entertainment and media market.
According to the report, traditional TV media is shifting towards digital TV. With this in mind, the entertainment industry and media market should focus their investments in tune with this latest trend.
Unfortunately, the study said that the said industries have been unable to keep up with the digital media activities of the new players, who are dominating the broadband content and services market.
Separately, other activities are beginning to emerge activities that we classify as digital economy (e-commerce, e-health, e-learning, smart grids, etc).
The traditional media companies have all established themselves in the emerging digital media market, with Seven, Nine and the ABC being the first to enter. However, the ABC more rapidly increased their market share among digital viewers.
Quality content is even more crucial as digital platforms are becoming relatively commoditised.
Telcos have tried to claim this territory but they continue to struggle to leverage their natural advantages. In Australia, Fairfax Digital, alongside the ABC and News Limited, has continued to compete for digital viewers.
However these traditional media companies have been on notice for more than a decade regarding the changes they would face with the developments in the digital media market. So far they have not taken decisive action, partly because they were afraid of cannibalisation and partly because their business models do not cater for swift business action. This has produced a decline in their revenues, but far more importantly they have failed to seize a share of the new market, which is now dominated by newcomers such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook.
The National Broadband Network is the next stage.
Again the traditional media have largely been missing from this debate, but the NBN will create new changes, with new options. The traditional media players can take a leadership role, looking at the trans-sector opportunities the NBN has on offer or they can simply copy their outdated models onto the NBN, perhaps by using the wholesale services of a telco.
Over recent years video applications over broadband have emerged, as Internet media companies and content producers seek to exploit the added speed and capacity of broadband infrastructure. The killer application on these networks is video-based communication, mainly produced by users themselves.