Digital Forms Of Broadcasting And Content: A Report

Background

Discuss about the Report for Digital Forms of Broadcasting and Content.

Digital Broadcasting is a practice in which the Digital Signals are used for broadcasting over radio frequencies. The actual operation behind digital broadcasting is to translate sound and images into a digital data rather than analogue waveforms. Due to a number of technological reformations around the globe, there is a worldwide transition to digital broadcasting. Digital links are said to be more efficient than the Analog links as there is a great availability of room for the content provide to provide improved quality of signals with more efficient bandwidth usage. The move to Digital Broadcasting is a complex one and requires numerous resources. It is a potentially long process and even involves many stakeholders. The crucial ones include the Country’s government, the policy makers, regulators, broadcasters and consumers.

When seen through Australian perspective, then Digital is not about future achievements, but the leading researchers think it as a crucial element of today. The digital era has always been a major catalyst in the carrying out significant changes in the broadcasting industry. The prime role of the broadcasters is to provide the content that is liked and appreciated by the viewers and through Digitization provides a medium to produce better and improved quality content (IBISWorld, 2016). Australian free-to-air television began 50 years ago and in the present scenario, almost 7.5 million viewers are there. The late 1990s was a game changing era as the Australian government set digital television policy so that the free-to-air networks could migrate to digital ones and the analog spectrum are set free. Over the past decade, television broadcasting has received a number of followers followed by a period of fast-track evolution which included developments in Digital Technology. The drastic improvements in the ways the contents are acquired, produced and even delivered to the viewers, have strengthened the television network and made it the most reliable source of entertainment among the viewers across the globe. These developments have ensured that the television network provides an unprecedented volume of high quality content to the viewer’s so that they are retained for a longer duration (Isaac, 2016).

The following essay is an attempt to analyze the pure amalgamation of Digital Broadcasting and Sports Industry in Australia. The essay will deeply evaluate the prime role played by the Digital Broadcasting elements in uplifting the sports industry and making it the highest revenue generating industry in Australia. There will also be a discussion about how the Australian Sports Industry adopted the transformation from Analog to the Digital Broadcasting Era and how this particular event changed the face of the Industry. The future implications and recommendations are also suggested so that the pivotal elements of this new form of Broadcasting are easily applied over other industries too (Milan, 2003).

Digital Broadcasting in Australia

The Australian country especially the sports sector is being assisted by productive television broadcasting privileges contracts, official and company’s sponsorships in form of CSR fund and also hold by a major spectator’s community. The sports sector is anticipated to nurture by 4.75% annually over the next five years, since last 5 years it has been grown 3.5% annually and has been able to achieve a total turnover of $A6.2 billion. The foremost sporting bodies are being continuously supported and assisted by highly-skilled management personnel in regulate to hold or exploit the market share in a progressively more competitive environment. The rising professionalism of the sport participant at the privileged level would facilitate the effective development in sports coaching and athlete management sector. The rising erudition and involvement of sports coaching and management in Australia would also facilitate and enhance the opportunity to market services from other country to athletes. The Australian Sports industry is made up of a number of crucial entities, all of which is driven entirely by the widespread popularity of Sports in the country. Within the Sports sector the largest sub-industry is the Sport’s Administration and could also be regarded as the main source of revenue growth for the sector. The pivotal reason behind this fact has been the surging value of new broadcast rights deals for the organization such as AFL, NRL and Cricket Australia. The deeper analysis of the sector unveils that it is in its mature stage of the Economic cycle and myriads of sub industries within the sector manages a wide range of associated risks to maintain a consistency in the operations of the industry. The sector has benefited a lot from the increased value of broadcast rights to TV broadcasters (Chiyamwaka, 2011). The Australian Government plays a prime role in delivering sports related policies in the industry and even generating the required funds for its development. The support from the political parties to all levels of sports, ranging from community grassroots sports to the national elite level, has helped the industry to take all types of risks associated with the expansion of the sector. The Television Broadcasting in Australia had a significant impact on the Sports Sector. Sports’ broadcasting has driven a number of more significant broadcasting advancements. For instance, the advancements in this field have given rise to On-field Cameras, Multi- View Broadcasting and Super Slow Replays to make the sports events more appealing. It seems that each of the new Sporting events has introduced a new camera angle or an innovative Broadcast Feature (Plum Consulting, 2014).

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The structure of sports in Australia is shown below:

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) was established in the year 1932 and consists of a wide range of the Broadcasting mediums including TV, Radio, Internet as well as many retail outlets across the country. It works with a prime aim to broadcast such programs that have cooperation in conserving the national uniqueness of the continent and simultaneously preserve the importance of the regional and rural communities in Australia. The ABC is entirely financed by the government Grant-in-aid. The advancements in technology and the diligence of the Corporation members have allowed this unit to transform from only being a Government owned television network into a renowned leader in the fields of Sports, News and current affairs.

The inception of the Sports sector in the world of Television was nearly 70 years ago. As compared to its counterpart, the “live” television, the modern sports broadcast offers viewers a virtual experience of the front- row seat of all the leading International and National Sporting events. A televised broadcast of the college baseball game between Princeton and Columbia Universities, in the year 1939, formed the backbone of the modern sports broadcast (Ukessays Team, 2015). The Broadcasting event is considered as an unrehearsed outcome which is regarded as the root cause of the expansion of the audience for mass technology. In the beginning years of broadcasting, a single camera was used to capture the details of the events. Lately, the sports broadcasting developed into a business-driven multi- billion dollar event. This era marked an equal importance of the Umpire’s decision in the field and that of the Broadcasting rights and myriads of Sponsorship contracts. The Sports industry in Australia, or in any other developed or developing continent, has an inherent capability to appeal a wider cross-section of the community. This fact continues to drive the commercial viability of television among the viewers across the world. It is a well-known fact that a sporting event, by its nature, has a tendency to occupy a huge television time as compared to the other competing viewable contents (Sherwood, 2016). The major international sports events in Australia Television Broadcast include: Olympics, Formula 1 Racing, and World Cup Football. The premium quality of sports broadcast delivered during this period has a capability to attract massive television audience across the continent.

Australians prefer sporting events on their Television Sets only. A survey conducted in the year 2014 revealed that four out of the top five rating television programs were related to Sports only. The sales of sports media broadcast rights act as a good source of income for a small number of Australian Sporting organizations. The recent advances in the digital communication technologies like satellite, cables, records, and many more have changed the landscape of how the Sporting content is delivered to the users. These technologies have also had a great influence on the Australians on how they watch and interacts with a live sporting event and the contents provided by the sports media (Kepreotes, 2007).

The initial era of the sports broadcasting industry began with the live terrestrial sports broadcasts and pay-per-view cable. The Digitization has reformed the way the content is delivered. The digital platforms like Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT), Digital Cable, IP/ Internet Technologies and even the Mobile TV has changed both the delivering and viewing modes of the Sporting event. This has significantly marked a new era in the Sports Broadcast. The sophistication of the sports broadcast has changed a lot from the time the first analogue coverage of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics was provided. In the year 2000, HDTV (High Definition television) marked its presence in the Sydney Olympics. The Athens Olympics 2004 marked a period of increased terrestrial broadcast infrastructure of a digital nature and so a wide range of viewing platforms began to emerge at a rapid pace. The year 2004 also marked a hilarious entry of the Mobile TV featuring all the crucial aspects of the Sports Broadcasting. In the year 2006, the Commonwealth Games held in Melbourne the Australian Broadcast industry showcased its dynamic DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting- Handheld) mobile television technology. This demonstration unveiled the potential of this new technology at large sporting events such as the Commonwealth Games. This technology provided over 7 channels of live broadcast. The Beijing Olympics 2008 continued to be broadcasted by the Mobile TV with increased provision of digital radio services. This Olympic event also became the first sporting event to be entirely captured by the HDTV technology (Hume, 2016).

The Digital Broadcasting has extended the influence over the lives of the people and is not anymore the concept of just sitting back and watching what the TV serves. The DTV has increased the involvement of the customers in the Broadcasting as now they can customize the channels and the content according to their needs and interests. The increasing number of viewing platforms on demand has made the number of viewers to increase at a rapid pace and even a wide range of choices have been introduced to them. Thus, the television services these days have started to incorporate interactive components that have a significant influence over the viewing habits of the viewers. For instance, the Television content, in the earlier days, was served according to the sponsors and the broadcasters, but as the digital era has begun, the customers only demand and the Broadcasters just fulfill them. Same is with the Sports category. As the choices of the people have narrowed to a particular sport then they only have to pay for that particular channel and even for a required period of time. It is already mentioned that due to a high availability of Selectivity available with the modern interactive digital broadcasting, the consumers’ viewing habits have been dramatically influenced the way the customers make their choices and view the available content in a customized manner (Grealy, 2016). The viewers can easily switch to their service providers as soon as they feel that their demands are not being met in a proper manner. A large availability of different options of the same genre has strengthened their buying power and they only prefer the ones which have the potential to meet their changing demands. Moreover, the providers are pushed to transform their ways of working because the customers are the prime stakeholders in any business and their satisfaction could only yield lucrative outcomes for a firm (Free TV Australia Limited, 2016).

Australia’s Perspective on Sports Broadcasting

When Digital Broadcasting is looked through its principles, then there are a number of benefits of this service over the other counterpart, i.e. the Analogue Broadcasting. The researchers have succeeded in proving a fact that that the Digital Broadcasting elements use the same amount of spectrum to deliver multiple service at a single time that an Analogue Broadcasting element  use to deliver a single channel. But the heavy range of services and choices offered by the Digital Broadcasting often consumes a large spectrum. However, if the customers are satisfied, then there is a huge chance of increment in the customer base and this could compensate the multiple spectrum costs of the Broadcasting Agencies. Apart from this, there are a number of advanced features in the Digital Broadcasting, which has definitely helped it in having an edge over all its counterparts. The most notable among them is the Advance Digital Pre-broadcast production techniques (Husmith, 2013). These include compression of the signal sent and received, multiplexing and repurposing the spoiled and erroneous content. These new-aged features have allowed the leading Broadcasters to customize both the Quality and Volume of the content being provided. The wide range of available choices is not the only advantage of the Digital Broadcasting era, but this service also allows the customers to play streaming videos with different resolutions. The prime requirement of a sports lover is to view his favorite match with the best image quality and HDTV solves the purpose. But, the fact is that all the High-definition TV can only display images with the use of digital data. Hence, all the sports lovers preferring HDTV sets will automatically shift towards the elements of Digital Broadcasting. Also, the users do not have spare time to tune to the best resolution of their TV sets and for this the Digital Broadcasting offers the received digital signals to be tuned automatically and even select the best resolution for the TV.

The real electronic systems are prone to a number of imperfections which have a tendency to destroy the analog signals but not the digital signals. The precise signal level of the latter one is not necessary. The broadcast technology gives the sports fans around the globe to share the excitement of the major sporting events. The multiple platforms and multiple formats of the Broadcasting technologies have transformed the viewing experience entirely by introducing a number of thrilling performances in the sporting events (Tsiotsou, 2011). The business stream has made the sale of Broadcasting and media rights as a key income stream and thus this sector has been benefitted a lot due to the flow of financial resources from these resources. The broadcasting technologies, financial support to the Sports industry has also nurtured the potentials of a large number of talented athletes and even the teams participating in the Australian Sports Industry are experiencing a long term financial viability.

Another notable fact which needs to be discussed in this essay is the key importance of content in the field of sports. Obviously, one cannot serve anything to the viewers in the name of digitization. Without informative and logical content, the digital property is just the lines of codes. It is in the nature of a good content to drive digital strategies and in turn the customer advances content production. The identification of the proper targeted content is necessary for a leading channel as this will only lure a huge customer base towards the channel. The content has to be of the high quality and widely accepted by the public and the type of culture it is being delivered. During Sports Broadcast, the content generally focuses on the field of the matches, but as it is trending now-a-days a lot of content is displayed out of the field. The unrelated content sometimes may not be acceptable by the public and may defame the service providers due to controversies (Matsumoto, 2013).

In today’s Scenario both Sports and Broadcasting goes hand in hand. The sports need Broadcasting as much as Broadcasting needs sports. The financial resources being spent on the Live Sporting events have transformed a number of sports taking them to the front page headlines. A symbiotic relationship is observed between the TV companies and viewers in which in order to entice the viewers the companies have to deliver the best quality of content over their channels. In turn, they receive an enormous amount to maintain their businesses (Stats LLC., 2016). There is a vast difference between actually watching the match by being present there and capturing the live match action on the TV sets. The Broadcasters work does not end in putting the cameras at the right position, but at the same time they need an entire outside Broadcast infrastructure. To capture the best show, there has to be multiple camera angles, live slow-motion replays, insightful graphics and the most important above all; an intelligent and influencing commentary. It is believed by the researchers that the some of the most interesting footage, at the Live Sporting events, actually never reaches the screen (Vazquez, 2013). This kind of footage is generally taken through aerial or remote cameras. This lead to the discovery of another innovative element of Broadcasting, in which the leading sports panels decided to monetize such unseen content by making it available to the viewer’s outside the broadcast. This influential idea is called as remote production, which acts as a boon for minority sports which are never exposed on TV due to unavailability of enough budgets (Earl, 2016).

The sports’ broadcasting has always been an event in which there is a lot of money and investments at stake. The viewer’s tend to pay only if they receive a good quality of content over their TV sets. As the money is being debited from their accounts so in turn they need an access to more real time content. As most of the Australian prefers watching sports on their TV sets, hence, they want to see flashpoints being replayed instantly from myriads of angels (Hamdhaidari, 2016). They simply want to get the experience of the stadium, but without leaving the comfort of their homes. The Sports broadcasters have taken these facts into deep considerations and have made it as a primary aim to take every fan closer to the action than ever before. In fact in Australia, the Australian Football League (AFL) and the National Rugby League (NRL) has been in limelight for discussion with digi-giants such as YouTube, Netflix and Facebook regarding the rights to their games. In the modern contract of AFL, Telstra has compensated around $150 Million dollars for the rights to AFL games, which basically allow the admittance to matches on the individual’s mobiles. For this purpose, the new technology has been incorporated in which the Drones are used to take the cameras directly into the thick action (WIPO Team, 2016). This light-weighted technology allows the broadcasters to get the footage of the action like never before and provide unseen experiences to the viewers. The drones are capable enough to deliver high quality shots that are fit for broadcast on live television (Doyle, 2016). This technology uses lightweight broadcast- quality HD cameras and real-time HD video links to deliver unseen experiences to the viewers (Devaney, 2016).

While concluding it could be practically inferred that, digital broadcasting of the sports events had always been a competitive marketplace where companies compete with one another to deliver the best content to the viewers and stand at the highest position. The increasing competition in this field and the changing perceptions of the consumers, over the way they view their favorite sport over television, has pushed the Broadcasters to include a number of technological advancements and deliver the best experiences to their audiences. The introduction of Live Streaming Videos and increasing craze of the Internet among the viewers have posed a substantial challenge to the monopoly of the Digital Broadcasting Sports events on TVs, still the popularity of enjoying the events from home has not ended.  Maximum of the Australian Viewers still considers their home comfort and TV screens over their handy devices live streaming The Sports events at any possible place outside their homes. The relationship between Sports and Television Broadcasting has reached to a different level with the advancements in the technologies. The Broadcasters are evaluating few innovative ways to deliver the best quality of Sports content to the Australian Viewers. The on field cameras, multi-view broadcasting and live slow motion replays have made the sports events on TV a great experience. The Digital broadcasting is even preferred over the Lives Streaming because the researchers in this field can never anticipate the actual requirement of the bandwidth while delivering the services and even is not sure that the Live Streaming services would be able to handle the network crowd during crucial international events. The advantages of the Digital Broadcasting are quite numerous and it will take a good time in overpowering its monopoly in the sports industry. The Broadcasters have included numerous advanced features that made this service unique and quite better than the quality of content delivered through analogue signals. Hence, the new technologies in competing with such services which normally possess enough appealing services indicating and attracting a huge and wide customer base at a single time. Otherwise, the reign of this Digitized service seems to be continuing for a longer period as the present popularity looks quite high. However, as the perceptions and behavior of the customers keep on changing continuously with time. Hence, one cannot predict that at what period of time this popularity will subdue. To capture the minds of the consumers, the Digital Broadcasting services in the Australia have to maintain the quality of content it is delivering at present and even improve it in the coming decades.

The future implication of Sports Broadcasting is already anticipated and all of them points towards a fact that as the users are receiving high quality of digital services then their viewing expectations will definitely rise in the coming future. As the sports fans have numerous options to access their favorite live matches outside their home, then in this scenario a crucial question arises that whether the broadcasters will be able to deliver the content keeping a pace with the future technology. In Australia, the Australian Football League (AFL) and the National Rugby League (NRL) have engaged with companies like YouTube, Netflix, and Facebook and initiated talks with them about the rights to their games (Donnigan, 2015). Another similar fact which came forward and has been recently noticed was of the latest AFL deal in which Telstra has paid over $150 million to allow its users to access the matches over their smart-phones. All these facts normally indicated towards a single thing that as the concept of the Internet is booming at an unbelievable speed and even the OTT (Over- the-top, Internet Delivery) services are getting more and more attention, then there are chances that the big games may face a transformation from the Televised World to the Live Streaming Platform.  But, as this is only an anticipation of the coming future, so no one can predict the trends the Broadcasting Industry will face in the coming Decades. Also, the recent trends say that 95% of the video viewing in one of the developed country is occurring at the traditional broadcasting platform and over 4% on the Internet and only 1% on the smart-phones (Williams, 2015). From these statistics, it can be interpreted that the success rates of Digital Broadcasting are quite high and even the viewer’s find this platform more appealing than the others.

According to a survey conducted by Accenture, the overall sports market is likely to reach at $ 228 billion at the end of the year 2016 and during this period the digital live events will account for around 30% of the total share. As the current status reveals the efficiency of the Australian Sports Industry to satisfy the customers with its Digital services, hence in the coming future there are sure chances that the Sector will maintain this ability to create and execute flawless digital delivery of live events. For the sports fan, the quality of the broadcast matters over the mode of delivery or viewing device (Hamdhaidari, 2016). As the confusion arises that whether in the coming decades, the importance of the Digital Broadcasting will remain same or not, then in this reference a fact has been put forward that if the Live Streaming concept will replace the Digital Broadcasting elements, then whether the former will have an ability to handle the increased data that comes when the service provider streams data to millions of users in a simultaneous manner (Phillips & Marshall, 2016). As, the Bandwidth fluctuates every minute during Live streaming, hence it is impossible to evaluate the actual Bandwidth that will be required throughout the process. Although, at present, the leading OTT providers like Netflix and Hulu are unveiling a number of innovative ways to manage the Bandwidth at the time of Video- On- Demand. Due to these and many other disadvantages of Live Streaming, the Monopoly of the Digital Broadcasting is still continuing in the Sports Industry (Australian Government, 2016). But, as there are always good chances for improvement in each case. Hence, if the Live Streaming takes up the challenge of providing the similar experience to the viewers, but through video streams of smaller without sacrificing the viewing quality, then there are sure chances of this new technology which could capture huge customer base at a rapid pace on the broad level (Doeven, 2013).

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