Commercial broadcasters call for scrapping of drama and children's TV quotas

Commercial television broadcasters have called for the scrapping of regulations which force them to produce Australian drama, documentary and children’s programming as audiences drift away from free-to-air TV towards streaming services.

While Australian drama used to be profitable for the networks because it was popular, the arrival of on-demand services has seen a dramatic fall in audiences for local drama – from an average of 1 million in 2008 to under 400,000 in 2018.

At the same time costs for drama production have risen from $500,00 per hour to $760,000 per hour in 10 years.

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Seven West Media, Nine Entertainment, Network 10, Southern Cross Austereo, Prime Media Group, WIN Network and Imparja Television say they spend $1.6bn every year on Australian content despite declining revenues as a result of digital disruption and 85% of what they screen is Australian.

The broadcasters’ lobby group, Free TV, says children’s quotas, which dictate that networks must produce children’s and pre-school programs, are irrelevant in 2020 and cause “significant commercial harm”.

“The quotas have become completely irrelevant to modern Australian families, their children and their viewing choices,” the submission says. “It is time they are abolished and a new approach is adopted – one that recognises what and where children are watching.”

But the networks have consistently failed to promote or properly schedule their children’s content which is vital to enable children to see and hear Australian faces, places and voices, the president of the Australian Council on Children and the Media Elizabeth Handsley says.

“It has been very frustrating over the years to see so much excellent children’s content going unheralded because of the way that licensees have scheduled it, and failed to promote it,” Handsley told Guardian Australia. “All the more so when you see how aggressively they promote a lot of other content. It’s also been frustrating to see the government, year after year, failing to call them on these practices.”

The Australian content the networks want to produce is not drama and children’s TV but the more lucrative genre of reality TV like The Voice and Married at First Sight, news and current affairs and sport.

“The removal of all content quotas would allow commercial free-to-air broadcasters to make programming decisions based entirely on their audiences and allow them to more effectively and efficiently meet their business objectives,” the Free TV lobby has told the government in a submission to the Supporting Australian Stories on our Screens inquiry.

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In 2008, Channel Seven’s Packed to the Rafters was the highest rating Australian drama series, with an average five city metro audience of close to 2 million viewers. In 2018 and 2019, no drama series made it to a million viewers.

“Australians love watching Australian programs on their Free TV services,” Free TV CEO Bridget Fair said. “But the current rules are undermining our ability to invest in the local content that our audiences want to watch, and locking us in to delivering quota mandated programs that are increasingly failing to find an audience.

“Children’s quota programming is now attracting average audiences of less than 1,000 children and costs continue to rise at a rate that inhibits investment in other Australian content that audiences want to watch.”

But the removal of content obligations would decimate the Australian film and television industry and have a devastating effect on Australian culture, including the screen and media industry, Screen Producers Australia said in an opposing submission.

Instead, the screen industry guilds and associations argue that all content providers, including Seven, Nine, Ten and their regional affiliates, national broadcasters ABC and SBS, subscription television Foxtel, and streaming services Netflix, Stan, Disney+, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, Facebook Watch and YouTube Premium should be made to produce a certain amount of new drama, documentary and children’s content.

Related: Netflix, Apple and Stan could be required to boost Australian content

The government’s options paper flagged this idea in April, saying subscription services “would be required to invest a percentage of their revenue in new Australian scripted programming”.

The creative industry also called for national broadcasters to receive additional funding specifically for Indigenous and children’s content in order to compensate for the free to air’s refusal to make it, another option suggested by the options paper.