CBA General Conference - 2004
NEWS AND SPEECHES
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Can Small Broadcasters Have Big Ambitions?
Ken Clark, Chief Executive Officer, Fiji Television Ltd.
Four years ago I had the privilege of sharing experiences with you in Cape Town. I started with reference to Winston Churchill’s very short speech to his old school – Never Give Up – Never, never, never.
I’m tempted to be even shorter this time. The question is “Can small broadcasters have big ambitions?”
The answer is “Yes”.
End of speech.
Some of the answer, I suppose, relates to the definitions.
What is big?
What is small?
Our day-to-day experience here in Fiji is small – but there are certainly broadcast operators in smaller places working away at making a success of their service to their communities.
Let’s set that scene.
Fiji has about 330 Islands. (Which is one of the reasons it pays to have someone local with you when you sail these waters. The islands seem to pop up in unique places.) More than 100 of them have people on them. One quite large one is more than 1.5 hour’s flight from the one we are on now – Rotuma is just over 400 kilometres to our north and west. No locally relevant television service is now delivered to Rotuma.
Fiji’s Economic Zone covers 1.3 million square kilometres.
The total population of Fiji is about 800,000 people. More people live in the city of Auckland, New Zealand (part of what is considered a small country), than there are in the whole of Fiji.
Ours is an emerging economy. According to the World Bank our per capita annual income is $US 2,160 – that’s about $4,000 Fiji dollars a year.
The television industry is just coming up to its 10th anniversary later this year. There was an experimental service established by TVNZ in 1991 which was successful and led to the establishment of Fiji TV in 1994.
Fiji TV was established as a business – a commercial enterprise with the involvement of its founding partner TVNZ. There were some very important procedures put in place at that time which provided for the growth of the organization and the maturity that was to follow.
There were also some things that needed to change if the newly established enterprise was to mature on its own and prosper.
The initial ambition was to establish an effective television service to serve the needs of the people of Fiji – both commercially and in entertainment, news and current affairs. That remains a fundamental part of our plan but we are also growing beyond that.
The initial 1994 plan called for the company to reach 85 percent of the people on its own, and then, once that goal had been reached, to work out a plan with government for a support programme which would extend the signal to reach all of the people of Fiji – and in this case, we would now be talking about the very hard to reach places – the places that do not, even today, have any relevant local television, cannot watch the evening news, or the Wellington Sevens Tournament where their rugby players do so well.
Sometime ago we reached that magic 85% figure for the free to air service and back we went to our drawing boards to determine what we might do next. Pay television is now delivered to this island – Viti Levu, only.
The result was our offer to government to extend our signals throughout the rest of Fiji at our cost, without any subsidy from the taxpayer, but using satellites so a number of challenges are met at once.
First, of course there would have been the matter of deciding which community might receive a signal first. Then we’d have to find a mountaintop for the transmitter, get a road in, get a signal to the transmitter, establish power there, work out arrangements with the land owners – and all of that.
If we use satellites everyone has access to the signals at the same time and under the same conditions.
If we use Ku Band satellite, then the cost to the consumer and the ability to handle the technology is made easier – the dishes can be small – here in Fiji about a metre across- and the cost per community or household can be less than a thousand dollars Fijian – less than $500.00 US. That’s still a lot of money to certain parts of our community but it’s a beginning and access can be there.
They’ll also need sufficient power to be able to drive a television receiver – and that will be a challenge in some areas.
So we’ve made that decision, off we go and everything going according to plan we’ll be uplinking from Suva by July first this year.
How do we support that?
There won’t be much new advertising revenue – we get no taxpayer support – how can we accomplish the goal.
Well, let’s go back to our beginning. Remember, someone else was doing our programme acquisition. They were acquiring what we asked them to acquire but they were doing the work. We changed that. We generated the capital and acquired the necessary equipment to do the programme dubbing here in Fiji. We worked with the programme distributors over a quite long period of time and found that they would co-operate.
That accomplished a number of things including the ability to acquire certain programme rights for the Pacific and find new customers for the programmes in which other Pacific Island nations might have an interest.
And we found they did – we now provide certain programmes and sports rights to several smaller nations – that allows for the distributors to work through us and access customers they might not otherwise be able to service and it provides the programmes to those nations at a price they find attractive.
It also meant that our people could grow in their assignments – mature in the industry, learn more and become more effective – very valuable in an emerging television nation and we could grow our pay television business throughout the country, satisfying those who have been asking for it for years.
Now, add in the opportunity that satellite delivered television service might generate (bearing firmly in mind the demands of copyright requirements) and we have something more that we can use to help our neighbours, if they wish us to do so, and which can be used to help us support the extension of free to air and pay TV signals through out some rather large, relatively empty spaces in our own nation.
Its our expectation that, we can help our neighbours do in their home markets what we have worked at for ten years now – grow the home service, generate the revenue necessary to provide not only the entertaining material that television does so well, but also offer the news and current affairs services which can be so valuable to a nation. Some of those nations are much smaller than we are. But our view is traditional in the sense that even the longest journey begins with the smallest step.
We have taken those steps, we are on the journey, the task and the ambition is large and we are getting it done.
So the answer to the initial question, from our viewpoint is
Yes