These broad features—vigorous private commercial networks, weakened public service sector; ongoing substitution of locally produced programs for imports—are part of a more general international and historical pattern that is repeated elsewhere in the pastand the present. Hence there is a good deal of interest for television scholars generally in the historic trajectory of Australian television, both for its own sake and because of the comparative insights it offers. McLuhan once claimed that Canadian media developments were an “early warning system” for trends that would later appear elsewhere and Richard Collins has echoed this claim, warning pessimistically of the possible “Canadianization” of television in Europe and elsewhere. However, the Australian experience has been at once more complex, more interesting, and more positive. Given the linguistic and cultural barriers at work in countries in Europe and in other parts of the world, there are strong grounds for believing that “Dallasization” of international television, so much feared in the 1980s and early 1990s, was in fact a passing phase. Instead, the Australian experience of television, most especially that of “import substitution,” is likely to be repeated elsewhere.

Structure

Television broadcasting began in the 1950s (Sydney and Melbourne in 1956 and Brisbane and Adelaide in 1959), a time that links it with television start-ups in other “major minor” territories including Canada, Italy, and the Netherlands. In fact, however, the structure of the Australian system was set in place in 1950 when a newly elected conservative federal government reversed the decision of a postwar socialist government that television was to be a monopoly in the hands of a public service broadcaster. Instead, the new government decided that television was to be a dual system comprising a private, commercial sector and a public service one. This decision could be justified on the structural grounds that Australian radio had been a dual system since 1932 when the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) had been established. (In point of fact the 1932 development had been intended to create a unitary, public service broadcasting system along the lines of the BBC, an outcome thwarted when private broadcasters bought out community radio licenses after surrendering their own to the government.)

This dual system of Australian television remained in place from 1956 until the licensing of community television stations in 1994 and the advent of a cable subscription service in 1995. This is not, however, to suggest that the channel choice of viewers remained the same over this period. In 1956 viewers in the larger cities had two commercial and one public service channel to choose from. By 1965 there were three commercial services available. In 1980 a second public service channel went on the air while the community channels of 1994 signaled both the advent of a third sector as well as the sixth channel in the system. In deciding on the shape of the commercial services the initial consideration was technical: how many transmitting frequencies could be made available in each center of population? The answer generally was one, although in larger centers it was two.

Commercial television licenses were awarded to two operators in the state capitals of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Adelaide, and one in Canberra, Perth, and Hobart. One commercial license was awarded in smaller cities and towns. This development occurred in several stages but by 1965 nearly 80 percent of the country came within the reach of television.

The granting of two licenses in the four most populous cities facilitated the development of networking arrangements across the east coast capital cities. Between 1956 and 1987, this system meant a combining together of local interests for the purposes of cost sharing for program buying and program production. With newspaper companies securing major shares in several of these stations, the first metropolitan networking arrangements built on long-term associations between different capital city press proprietors. Hence, for example, Frank Packer’s TCN Channel 9 Sydney soon had links with HSV Channel 7 Melbourne. However, Packer had ambitions to establish a television network chain, applying unsuccessfully for commercial licenses in Brisbane and in country areas of New South Wales. In 1960 he bought GTV Channel 9 in Melbourne and the Nine Network was born. With some 35 percent of the national population, Sydney and Melbourne formed the hub of the network while Brisbane and Adelaide became satellites. The commercial stations with the designation “7” were forced into partnership but, lacking a common owner, the Seven Network (which emerged later in the decade) was always a looser association.

The Packer buyout was permitted under a two-station ownership rule contained in the 1956 Broadcasting and Television Act and the Melbourne purchase highlighted the dominance of newspaper interests in Australian commercial television. Until the rule was changed in 1987, the Packer Consolidated Press group controlled TCN 9 and GTV 9, and the Herald & Weekly Times group operated HSV 7 while John Fairfax and Sons controlled ATN 7. The other notable press entrant was the young Rupert Murdoch, owner of the afternoon Adelaide News, who in 1958 gained the license for one of the first two commercial Adelaide television stations, NWS Channel 9.

In 1953 a Royal Commission had recommended that the ABC run the public service television service. The government accepted this advice and allocated one channel to the ABC. Single ABC television stations began in Sydney and Melbourne in 1956–57 and other ABC stations rippled out across the country over the next nine years. Under its long-serving general manager, Sir Charles Moses, the ABC gave little thought to the new medium. Instead it regarded television as an extension of radio, an attitude it shared with its great parent and model, the BBC. Thus by 1964, when Moses retired, the ABC’s audience share was below 10 percent and badly in need of a shake-up.

Programs

Early television owners and executives did not give a great deal of thought to program supply, concerned as they were with the capital cost of establishing and operating stations. Although several would-be licensees expressed commitment to the idea of locally produced programs both during the hearings of the 1954 Royal Commission on Television and the subsequent License Inquiries (1955–59), their initial practice did not encourage local production. Fortunately for them, the early 1950s had seen American television switch from the live production of network programs, including variety and drama, in New York and Chicago, to filmed-series production of fiction in Hollywood. Hence when television actually began in Australia, there was already a plentiful supply of high-quality fiction and other U.S. programming available and these soon dominated the prime-time schedule on the commercial stations. Owners and operators took advantage of this low-cost supply and quickly offset initial establishment capital costs of the system. Meanwhile, the ABC also achieved the same end through programs derived from the BBC.

Additionally these imports subsidized the production of local programs in several different genres. Variety/ light entertainment programs represented an important investment in the early years of Australian television and programs such as The Johnny O’Keefe Show, In Melbourne Tonight, and The Bobby Limb Late Show rated extremely well in prime time. Other genres of local production included news, game shows, and sporting broadcasts. There was also a small amount of “live” fiction produced in this period although, generally, it did not rate sufficiently well to justify the costs involved.

The most interesting area of local production was, however, that of television commercials. In 1960 the federal government issued a requirement that 100 percent of all commercials be locally produced. Even more than the indigenizing of formats and formulas, already under way in game shows and light entertainment, this protectionist measure signaled that import substitution was under way. Shortly, it would spread to higher-cost genres, including fiction.

The initial functions of Australian television stations lay both in distribution/exhibition and in program production. Hollywood in the studio era with its vertically integrated structure offered an appropriate blueprint. In the Australian situation, the creation of television production soundstages was necessary because the fragile feature film production industry of the 1950s mostly lacked such infrastructure. In addition, owning these facilities would give television operators control over programs, deemed to be necessary given the often dictatorial practices advertisers had already demonstrated in radio.

The most notable stations for in-house production in this early period were ATN Channel 7 in Sydney, GTV Channel 9 in Melbourne, and the ABC in those two cities. GTV Channel 9’s highly successful In Melbourne Tonight ran until 1975. Meanwhile, ATN persisted with in-house production until 1970, while the ABC only opened its doors to outside independent packagers in 1986.

Development of the System

Australian television history can be divided into four periods, covering the years from 1956 to the present. These can be designated as eras of Live Television, FilmedSeries Television, “Quality” Television and New Television. Some of their features have been touched upon already but they can be outlined as follows.

Live Television

In the phase up to 1965, the period of Live Television, the institution was bounded in part by its technology. Programs were either imported and therefore available on film, put live to air, or kinescoped as a filmed record of a live broadcast. The first video recorder was imported by Channel 7 Sydney in 1958, but, until around 1965, when other stations and production companies had video playback and editing facilities, the early machines made little difference to the practice of “live” television. A second technical feature was the local or regional character of the institution. Until 1964 there were no cable facilities that allowed the transmission of television signals from one capital city to another. Thus the continent consisted of a series of discrete, isolated television markets that often saw different local programs, regional schedules, and frequently geographically distinct commercials.

News programs, soap operas, and some early teenage music programs were a quarter-hour in length, although most programs ran for half an hour. A few imported fiction series, plays, and variety programs were longer, running 60 or 90 minutes. Schedules were dominated by half-hour programs such as The Mickey Mouse Club, The Lone Ranger, Sergeant Bilko, Hancock’s Half Hour, I Love Lucy, and others. Dominant fiction genres included westerns, action and crime, and situation comedy. This period of live television was also marked by a minority popularity of the one-off television play. This came in two forms; the first, emanating from the BBC, was dominated by a West End conception of drama and theater. It favored the stage plays of famous British playwrights such as Shakespeare, Shaw, and, in the modern period, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan. This model was the one adopted by ABC television. From the late 1950s it combined BBC imports with television versions of some famous Australian plays, generally adapting preexisting theatrical materials to television. The other kind came from US live television in programs such as The U.S. Steel Hour and Playhouse 90. The latter was adopted by ATN Channel 7 and its partner stations and led to several notable productions including Other People’s Houses, Tragedy in a Temporary Town, and Thunder of Silence.

Meanwhile, the ascent of current affairs still mostly lay in the future, although there were two notable pioneers. Four Corners, modeled on the BBC’s Panorama, did not begin on the ABC until 1961. In its earliest form it was more of a newsreel or news digest program, with miscellaneous items in each episode, rather than the hard-hitting investigative program it would later become. Its first producer left the ABC in 1963 and began a spinoff, Project 63, on TCN Channel 9, which ran for two years. Meanwhile, there was also little in the way of locally oriented documentary films. The ABC did not establish a production facility (teams of cameramen available to news, documentary, and drama) until 1959. Instead, especially in news, there was an enormous reliance on overseas filmed material.

Any “Australian content” in this era occurred in lower-cost production genres such as variety and quiz shows. Indeed there was a boom in local variety shows. Programs such as In Melbourne Tonight, In Sydney Tonight, Revue 60/61, Bandstand, and Six O’Clock Rock were important landmarks. In the more peripheral cities of Brisbane and Adelaide, local “tonight shows” were hosted by figures such as George Wallace Junior, Gerry Gibson, and Ernie Sigley. Early successful local quiz shows included the imported Concentration and Tic-Tac Dough, all adapted for TCN Channel 9 by Reg Grundy.

A final feature of these years was the practice of switching various formats, programs, and personalities from radio. Local examples of this kind of adaptation included Consider Your Verdict, Pick a Box, and Wheel of Fortune, which all made successful transitions to the small screen. There was also an unsuccessful attempt to move soap opera from radio to television between 1958 and 1960 when ATN Channel 7 produced, first, Autumn Affair and, then, The Story of Peter Gray. The same pattern of success and failure was repeated with radio personalities. Bob Dyer, Graham Kennedy, and others all made triumphant moves to television although one notable casualty of the new medium was famous radio personality Jack Davey.

These local successes in variety, game shows, and more occasionally drama meant that, despite the overwhelming presence of imported material, Australian programs had a distinct place in the television schedule. Indeed, it was through the variety program, the paradigmatic form of this early live period, that Australian television was given a local look or flavor. The genre also played its part in the emergence of a scheduling practice, still with us in the present, that mixed imported high-cost programs with lower-cost local content. But in the case of the variety show cycle, these often had international guests. Therefore, although they qualified under local content rules as Australian, they had, nevertheless, a distinctly international flavor.

However, various developments were afoot in the television system. By 1965 it was clear that Australian television had changed markedly. The task of popularizing the new medium had been immensely successful. Advertisers and audiences had seemingly signed an apparently permanent contract with television that installed them both as continuing subjects at, as it were, different ends of the system. The overall result, so far as the commercial broadcasters were concerned, was that owning a television station was akin to having a license to print money. However, influenced as always by the example of both U.S. and United Kingdom broadcasting, station owners came to wonder whether they might indeed follow the overseas lead and, as it were, print even more money. To do so, they needed to overhaul the existing system.

Filmed-Series Television

Two major changes in the institution at this time would bring about such an increase in profitability. First, an outsourcing of most production, particularly in the area of fiction, became a cost-stabilizing measure as stations farmed out production responsibility, especially labor budgeting, to independent producers. Thus, it is from around this time that we date the beginnings or consolidation of independent production companies. It is also no coincidence that at approximately the same time, ABC television drama was reorganized by the splitting of a composite radio and television department and the establishment of a separate TV drama division. Profitability was further boosted by a new form of routinization that revolved around the filmed series. For despite the drive toward financial rationality in the establishment period, the live television/magazine format had been financially unstable, capable of varying considerably so far as cost and quality were concerned. By contrast, the filmed-series use of recurring actors, sets and costume, stock footage, fictional formulas, and continuing characters helped establish this form as a more reliable guarantee of predictable costs and quality and, thus, the preferred form of Australian television programming. Consequently, the expensive, attention-grabbing variety shows and television plays of the early phase were less and less necessary as their “signature” function in the television schedule was increasingly usurped by filmed series.

At the level of corporate capital, television markets continued to be tightly controlled, mostly closed affairs although there was some negotiation of existing oligopolies when a third commercial station came on the air in the east coast capital cities and a second commercial station appeared in Perth. These new stations were partly brought about by the federal government’s desire to introduce new players into the field of commercial television station ownership. Ansett, a major transportation group, secured the licenses of ATV 0 Melbourne and TVQ Brisbane while amalgamated wireless Australasia, a telecommunications manufacturing group, obtained the license of Ten 10 Sydney. The new stations formed themselves into the 0-10 Network, so that east coast Australia now had three commercial networks. The newcomer was the weakest in terms of audience ratings—so much so that in 1973 a new federal labour government briefly contemplated revoking these licenses.

Apart from these difficulties, it was business as usual. The broadcasting stations endured as a modified vertically integrated business operation, deriving their program product both by making in-house and by buying-in from independent producers, retaining the core and most lucrative part of the business by distributing programs and commercials to the same wide and mostly captive audience that they had constituted in the earlier phase. Full program sponsorship declined as a broadcaster/advertiser practice in favor of magazine-type commercial “spotting” with the slots in question being increasingly filled by filmed rather than live commercials.

Meanwhile, the decision of stations to farm out program production to outside independent producers was an indication of just how confident in their own power they were in dealing with advertisers. In any case, the conditions of television production of filmed series favored them both in relation to advertisers but also in relation to the independent producers themselves. Not only did they continue to control finance but they also remained in charge of station facilities that constituted the below-the-line resources on most filmed series.

Like the establishment of a permanent coaxial cable between Sydney and Melbourne in 1964, the advent of the filmed series also helped reconfigure the size of television audiences. Now, as even smaller regional stations acquired videotape machines, regular program recording on videotape occurred, most especially with the more expensive forms of programs being produced in Sydney and Melbourne. In turn, two-inch tapes of these could be “bicycled” from one place to another across the country, thereby altering and improving production economies. Increasingly, the television market was not just that of one region but rather Australia wide.

With the exception of the Nine Network, there was no common ownership of Sydney and Melbourne stations. Nevertheless, loose networking arrangements remained in play so far as production cost sharing was concerned. Independent producers, led by Crawfords Productions, developed a production method that guaranteed to broadcasters the delivery of a standard-length half-hour or one-hour program episode each week. Producers set about their task by preshooting a certain amount of outside location film scenes and marrying this to station-produced indoor scenes. Some weeks later in the television station’s studios, this film material was integrated with program segments staged in the studios with a composite being recorded on videotape. Although film was later to replace video for outside recording, this integrated system became a standard in Australian television fiction production from this point on, easily surviving the introduction of color in 1975.

This shift in the method of program output changed both the production system and the look of Australian television. Live television had drawn heavily on vaudeville, stage, and theatrical traditions. By contrast, the filmed series was based on the example of Hollywood. Under this new order, there was a change in the preferred style and subject matter of Australian television. Host, studio audience, and soundstage space were banished. Instead, the filmed series tied its segments together by dint of a continuous fictional space wherein its dramatic characters moved and acted. The form also offered greater generic variety. Hence the Australian television fiction output in this period included such types as the thriller, the action/adventure form including the Australian western, situation comedy, and children’s fiction. But the popularity and success of these genres and some individual programs were as nothing compared with that of the police crime series. Indeed, there is no better index of the enormous stability of Australian television at this time than the remarkable durability of this genre across the period and the fact that one company, Crawford, could turn out programs (Homicide, Division 4, and Matlock Police) for each of the commercial networks. These were sufficiently alike for programmers and viewers to be sure of what they were getting and sufficiently different for them to keep coming back for more.

Meanwhile the development of a “vernacular literature” in filmed series was not confined to fiction but also occurred in current affairs and documentary. After a shaky start, the weekly Four Corners settled down to a new kind of investigative journalism. In 1967 the ABC began a daily current affairs show, This Day Tonight (TDT), modeled on the BBC series Today Tonight. The program had a hard-hitting journalistic drive that examined political and social issues in ways never imagined by earlier programs. It was a very big success for the ABC and markedly improved its ratings performance. These two programs were enormously influential in extending the range of current affairs television, on the ABC and commercial stations. Documentary series also brought the life of the nation within their scope. The ABC’s Chequerboard introduced cinema verité to Australian television, significantly expanding the range of social concerns and issues that could be examined. Meanwhile a second documentary series, A Big Country, also enlarged the audience’s sense of what constituted the nation.

However, the cancellation of the Crawford police series by the three networks within months of each other in 1975–76 indicated a crucial transformation overtaking the Australian television institution. The service was almost 20 years old and no longer an oddity or a newcomer but a permanent feature of the economic and social landscape. However, if television had become commonplace and taken for granted, this changed in 1975 with the advent of color. These changes (the end of the police cycle and the introduction of color transmission) signal a decisive shift in the Australian television institution.

“Quality” Television

The new technology reinvented television’s novelty and allure for broadcasters, advertisers, and viewers. Color led to a new boom in television advertising and in the sales of domestic receivers. A new drama serial, Crawfords The Sullivans, which began on the Nine Network in 1976, nightly reminded its viewers of this institutional shift. The program’s opening credit sequence juxtaposed its fictional family frozen ineluctably in a black-and-white past as against their spontaneous movement and activity in the “living color” of the present. Indeed, the show’s negotiation of a dramatic space between entertainment and quality marks the years between 1975 and around 1991 as a third period in the development of Australian television.

Without major disruption to the existing oligopoly, viewer choice was extended between 1976 and 1986 with the advent of new services and technologies. A new network, the Special Broadcasting Services (SBS), came on the air in 1980, at first serving only Sydney and Melbourne but gradually spreading to the other capital cities. SBS Television was designed to increase the media services available to ethnic Australians and it did this with multilingual programming. But SBS, with developing strengths in the areas of news, current affairs, documentary, and foreign films, also appealed to English-language viewers. As a second public service television broadcaster, it extended the range of choice of the traditional ABC audience, giving it an alternative to the ABC just as commercial viewers had gained an alternative to the Nine and Seven Networks in the mid-1960s.

Meanwhile, commercial television was booming. A major move had been the reinvigoration of the Ten Network thanks to Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited purchase of ATV Channel 0 Melbourne in 1978, and Ten Channel 10 Sydney in 1979. Determined to increase the network’s ratings, Murdoch strengthened Ten’s program budget. The network scheduled heavily in the area of miniseries and feature films and these helped push the network ahead of Nine and Seven in the ratings.

Television networking arrangements continued and consolidated. Networking still meant cost sharing between partners but now, with common Sydney and Melbourne ownership in the case of two of the three, it also came to mean an increasing centralization of administrative, financial, and program power in these two capitals, most especially Sydney. And, in turn, this also meant a diminution of local autonomy in the other state capital stations. The public service networks were national in their agency and reach. Indeed, the newcomer, SBS TV, went further in centralizing its network in Sydney with a schedule and a content that was entirely national.

Seven, Nine, and Ten continued to service the east coast state capital cities although in 1987, as a sweetener to major changes in cross-media ownership rules, the federal government allowed them to spread their operations across regional television catchments. The upshot of these changes was the gradual emergence toward the end of this period of a single, unified, Australia-wide television market. And, in turn, this structural shift underwrote a rationalization of television production facilities among the state capital city members. The chief of these was television studio spaces. Network partners used these and related facilities in a systematic way invariably locating the production of higher-budget programs such as fiction series in Sydney and Melbourne. Other types of lower-cost content including game shows and children’s television were usually allocated to studios in the outer state capital cities.

Advertising remained as the crucial element in the institution. As always, the fundamental and unchanging intention was to constantly maximize audience size to ensure that purchase rates for advertisers were as high as possible. Consistently too, networks needed to keep the frequency and volume of ads down in order to keep ad prices and audiences’ patience up. Advertisers on the other hand continued to want to run as many commercials as possible, keeping them short, cheap, and distanced from each other. Shifting from sponsorship to “spotting” had facilitated a general increase in advertising revenue.

On the face of it, however, such revenue could not rise beyond a certain point so that a new strategy was necessary to generate additional financial returns. How then to print more money? The answer that the Australian networks derived from their U.S. counterparts was demographics. By the early to mid-1970s, moving away from programming designed to aggregate a mass undifferentiated television audience, the broadcasters began developing finer demographic targeting, a strategy that could make some shows more expensive than the prevailing norm. The consequence was a new em-phasis on programming that would attract varying demographics and thus generate further revenues within the system. Accordingly, as always, there were moves to vary repetition with difference, standardization with distinction, innocuousness with active attraction. The era of “quality” television had arrived.

“Stripping” became a major scheduling strategy on commercial networks. As vehicles for this kind of scheduling, three important programming forms emerged in 1971–72. These were the nightly current affairs program, the early evening game show shown five evenings a week, and the half-hour continuing soap opera. From a network programming point of view, each of these “stripped” forms was a variant of each other, performing the same task of offering viewers the regularities and the pleasures of a steady feed of routine and, within limits, novel pieces of content of various kinds. Of the three, the most original was the continuous soap opera. Although produced in the first place for a domestic Australian audience, the cycle of drama serials that runs from Number 96 in 1972 to Neighbors and Home and Away achieved remarkable international sales success, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s.

Meanwhile, with these “bread and butter” forms in place, it became possible for the Australian television institution to develop a more complex hierarchy of programming types and reputations. Several fiction programs ceased to be anonymous industrial commodities. Hence, for example, some scriptwriters and producers became recognized names even outside the television industry. And, in turn, television series such as the ABC’s Scales of Justice also became objects of sustained critical attention not only as entertainingly informative viewing but also as auteur-based dramatic investigations of serious social subjects and issues.

Indeed, with a convergence of sorts between an Australian art cinema and a kind of Australian (art) television, notable writers and directors were joined by other noted feature film producers including Hal and Jim McElroy and Anthony Buckley. But the most famous name above the title was to be that of Kennedy-Miller, responsible for the popular and critical international success of the Mad Max feature film trilogy. In the 1980s, this group turned its attention to television and the result was a cycle of five historical miniseries beginning with The Dismissal (1983) and ending with Bangkok Hilton (1989), which garnered both popular and critical success. Significantly, for this general project of a “quality” television, a Kennedy-Miller auteur television “style” was soon identified.

However, this moment was not to last, as changes to cross-media ownership rules in 1987 brought about, first, the sale of networks and, shortly thereafter, their bankruptcy. These disturbances only heralded more ongoing recon figurations of the institutional field. Australian television is undergoing a sustained shift, away from an oligopolistic-based scarcity associated with broadcasting toward a more differentiated abundance associated with the present period of post-oligopoly. Thus, it is necessary to recognize that television has shifted into a fourth phase and needs to be labeled accordingly.

New Television

With a proliferation of new and old television services, technologies, and providers, Australian television is rapidly becoming a multichannel environment. As the system becomes more differentiated, new institutional players are coming from within and without. Thus, a sixth free-to-air channel, presently dedicated to community use, came on the air in 1994–95 while a fourth commercial network has been scheduled to begin in 2007. That same year of 1995 also saw the commencement of cable television and a pay-TV service. Hence, the present field not only includes the older network interests but also several newcomers including FOX, Telstra, Optus, and AUSTAR. At the same time, in the wings and looking to extend their newspaper interests into broadcasting are other groups such as News Corporation and Fairfax. Meantime, new trade agreements are likely to encourage other groups, both local and international, to enter the television arena.

The new multichannel environment is served and stimulated by new distribution technologies such as satellite, cable, and microwave and new computer software including the Internet. Television is also characterized by a multiplying nonexclusivity of content, which is now becoming available through other modes including marketing and the World Wide Web Additionally, the convergence with computers and mobile phones yields new forms of interactivity including electronic commerce, online education, and teleworking. Meantime, digital TV, Web TV, and personal video recorders may further strengthen a tendency toward niche and specialized programming.

Transfers, recycling, and franchising are rapidly becoming central features of the new Australian television landscape. At the same time, behind this proliferation of transfers is a set of new economic arrangements designed to secure a degree of financial and cultural insurance not easily available through other sources. Adapting already successful materials and content offers some chance of duplicating past and existing successes. Consequently, in Australian television over the past decade, like television elsewhere, there has been an explosion in the number of locally produced programs whose format or basic blueprint was first developed elsewhere. Among the favored modes are reality programs, game shows, and lifestyle and talk shows.

Some of the circumstances surrounding two reality productions can be cited as examples of this trend. First, the fact that a local production company, Southern Star, signed a joint venture agreement in 2000 with the Dutch format giant, Endemol. In turn, this arrangement led to several seasons of the global television program Big Brother being made for Australian television from 2001 onward. Meanwhile, a locally based production and distribution company, Screentime, recognized the format possibility of a New Zealand documentary series that traced the making of a local pop band. Remade with a variety of multimedia spinoffs and revenue streams, Pop Stars was a popular success in Australia. Screentime then introduced it in over 30 other countries, forming United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand chapters in the process.

However, despite these local developments, the popular and industrial success of particular genres including those of reality television comes at a price. Thus, it has been noted that there has been a significant downturn in the production of more expensive genres of content. Chief among these have been current affairs and fiction television. Thus, whereas previously Australian television achieved a distinctive place for itself in the area of international fiction exports, this is no longer the case. Instead, the industry in its most recent phase is a net importer of formats for the production of new series.

In summary then, certain key features in the structure and trajectory of Australian television are worth reiterating. Australia has in the past been relatively slow to innovate various technologies associated with television including the broadcast service itself, color transmission, and multichannel pay services. Nevertheless, despite these time lags, the system has exhibited a “historical modernity” in terms of its dual sections, weak public service, and strong independent commercial. In the years of the broadcasting oligopoly, substantial import substitution occurred leading to a vigorous television production industry that by the 1980s became a significant export earner. In the process the system spawned a number of successful companies and groups such as Murdoch’s News Limited, Packer, and the Grundy Organization that have been important players both locally and internationally. However, in recent years Australian television has been increasingly globalized in new ways including those of ownership, program content, and technology. This has also been a period of upheaval and transition and is still without an end in sight.