Divicom has a lot of work to do down-under.....................
afr.com.au
Digital TV's big picture:
a $30bn conversion cost
By Finola Burke and Grant Butler
Australia faces a $30 billion conversion cost for digital television over the next 10 years, with householders bearing the bulk of the expense, an independent market research house predicted yesterday.
The ACNielsen Australia research also foreshadowed that digital TV would give Australia's free-to-air television networks an "enormous" competitive advantage over the print media and claimed that TV advertising revenues would double to $5 billion a year over the next decade.
Australian households could expect to pay about $3,500 for a digital television set by the time the technology is introduced in 2001, ACNielsen's managing director in charge of media services, Mr Ian Garland, said yesterday.
The major commercial television networks face a $500 million to $800 million direct cost of converting to the new digital technology. However, Mr Garland told a seminar in Sydney that every household would need to eventually buy some sort of device to view high-definition TV, increasing the overall cost of the change to more than $30 billion.
Digital TV presented an "enormously powerful opportunity" for broadcasters, both because of the ability to split digital bandwidth into multiple channels and the potential to expand the traditional advertising format beyond sound and pictures to more detailed product information.
"There is an opportunity here that would be a real threat to print media," Mr Garland said, adding that the TV networks would eventually be able to customise digital advertising.
He predicted that, even though the same TV show may be watched by two adjoining households, one household would be able to receive advertising on pet care products while its neighbour could watch insurance advertisements. However, ACNielsen's predictions were met with some scepticism by the TV industry.
The Ten Network's general manager of network operations, Mr Gerry Thorley, pointed out last night that the TV networks were restricted from multi-channelling until 2005 and that, even then, he thought it unlikely that they would resort to splitting the signal for target advertising.
"When you split up the signal into six channels or four channels you can't send the signal in high definition format . . . and that is a fundamental shift away from what many advertisers want to do," Mr Thorley said.
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