Changes to advertising in recent years did not lead to the loss of locally-made children’s television but the removal of quotas, according to the Australian Children’s Television Foundation.
ACTF CEO Jenny Buckland, speaking at the Australian Children’s Content Summit, said the removal of sub-quotas during the pandemic led to commercial networks abandoning new commissions.
“I know sometimes the commercial broadcasters might have said that they had all those restrictions. In actual fact, there was quite a lot of stuff they could advertise,” she said.
“But I think the reality is they just didn’t want to do Children’s shows. They lobbied for so many years and for so long, and every politician who came into that Communications portfolio just had them on the door all the time. I just think they regarded it as a tax that they had to do Children’s shows.
“I really don’t understand… the ABC gets really big audiences for some Children’s shows, and always did. We would see that when we tracked audience numbers, back in the day, that something that was bought for the C Quota and was on Channel Nine for a couple of years, didn’t get much of an audience because they put it on at some ridiculous time, and didn’t advertise it.
“But we would see that it would go to the ABC…. and suddenly, the audience was tenfold, back in the day, to what it was.
“They didn’t want it to succeed under any circumstances. So I actually don’t think it was the advertising restrictions that were the problem.”
Bridget Fair CEO of Free TV Australia told TV Tonight, “The children’s television standards came into existence at a time when Australian children had no other source of audio-visual content than Free to Air television. But kids are no longer limited in this way with an ever-growing number of new choices including child-specific ad-free channels on the ABC, subscription streaming services and YouTube. As almost any parent can tell you, kids have moved to these new platforms in droves.
“The key issue driving Free TV’s push to remove C and P quota obligations was that the number of children watching C and P programs had dropped dramatically by the end of the last decade, with average audiences for C and P programs well under 5,000 children. It is impossible to sell advertising into audiences that size and as a platform that is required to be funded by advertising, if there is no audience we simply can’t generate the revenue to pay for the programs. More importantly, if no kids are watching these shows they are not having the intended cultural impact that C and P quotas were supposed to deliver.
“Broadcasters still provide plenty of programs that kids like to watch, particularly programs with broad appeal that bring families together. Commercial TV broadcasters spent $1.67 billion on Australian content last year and we are proud of our commitment to telling Australian stories and supporting the local production sector.”
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