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Tilted Cat Head
Administrator
Location: Manhattan, NY
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Quote:
Originally posted by Macheath
This is all my own speculation but:
It feels like there's similar manuvering taking place in the background of Australian politics. Currently our Government is making idle vicious threats towards the national public broadcaster. Meanwhile the three main free-to-air commerical channels are lining up with Microsoft, AOL-Time Warner and ?????? respectively to promote broadband integrated with their own online streaming television broadcasts.
The crucial thing is, most every broadband plan in Australia at the moment is savagely capped to only a few gigabytes - EXCEPT for content approved by the service provider. I forsee people signing up to the Channel 7/AOL broadband plan (for example) and henceforth becoming their bitch: You get our channel's material online for free; but you wanna watch someone else's streaming content? - pay 15 cents a megabyte!
Throw all this in with the impending privatisation of the final vestiges of our telecommunications infrastructure, abandonment of media-crossownership legislation and Rupert Murdoch's complete dominance of all cable television and things are looking fairly dangerous.
So look at our country and see if you can see similar "threads" being drawn across your own country.
I think in the next decade we'll be seeing the current small handful of transnational corporations even more powerful than they now are; more powerful than we could imagine.
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that's exactly what is already happening to some extent on AOL and on the Viacom channels.. while it does make sense to do the cross polination there still has to be a way to ensure that the minority is also heard.
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