Nick Herd introduces Networking: Commercial Television in Australia by outlining the ‘five fateful choices’ that constrained, or perhaps enabled, commercial television to assume its peculiarly Australian form during the past fifty years. These revolved around technical matters such as transmission standards (European or American?), whether commercial players should own ‘the spectrum’, the number of viable services given the problem of too many broadcasters chasing too little content, and localism in regional services. To these he might have added the decision to regulate local (Australian-produced) content.
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