TV broadcasters should favour, not fear the NBN

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 18 October 2009 07:27

Opinion and Analysis

According to Heydon, Telstra is already using RF channel to carry Foxtel on the FTTH networks it has deployed in greenfield sites, simply feeding the optical signal that normally goes into the 'last mile' coax of its HFC network into one wavelength on the FTTH network.

Heydon contends that today's free to air broadcasters could use an RF channel on the NBN from day one, without the government needing to make any regulatory changes, whereas trying to carry free-to-air broadcasts as IPTV over the NBN would throw up a "a bunch of tricky regulatory issues."

Moreover, he believes that Australia is uniquely placed to make this move, because most large scale overseas deployments of FTTH have been undertaken by telcos in a bid to counter the threat from cable TV companies.

Technically the case for putting broadcast and pay TV on the NBN seems fairly straightforward, but Heydon acknowledges that, in the longer term, it throws up considerable regulatory and commercial issues. For one, each free to air channel becomes, from the users perspective more akin to a single channel on a pay TV service, potentially changing how brands of content aggregators like Foxtel, of free-to-air broadcasters and of individual pay-TV channels are perceived.

The availability of an RF channel on the NBN also lowers considerably the barriers to entry for potential broadcasters. Whereas in the past the available spectrum has largely limited to the number of free to air broadcasters, the capacity of the RF channel is much greater and the commercial barriers to entry much lower: all a broadcaster would have to do to make its content widely available would be to feed it into the NBN.

Heydon says that demand for spectrum for mobile data will eventually make the move of broadcast traffic onto the NBN inevitable but he wants to see the broadcasting industry take the initiative now rather than be pushed later one.

"At the moment the only input [the Government] has been getting is from the broadcasters is about how bad it would be to put video on the Internet and that is the wrong discussion. I would like to see the broadcasters asking for an RF channel on the NBN, but they don't understand what to ask for."