State Of Pay

Whew! What a month it's been for Australian pay television. It's like watching a fast-moving polo match where the players are recognisable but only they know the rules. With Kerry Packer's Channel Nine now firmly back in the saddle of Australis/Galaxy and beating the begeezus out of his on-again, off-again rival Rupert Murdoch's Foxtel, not even Murdoch's faithful stalking pony Kerry Stokes' Seven, nipping at Foxtel's heels, has been able to lift the spirits of the losing Foxtel team. And the competing Optus teams' captain, Geoff Cousins, can smell blood.

There's so much activity that even three referees needed for polo - the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the Australian Broadcasting Authority and Senator Richard Alston, the Minister for Communications - are having a hard time of it. And here we viewers are watching from the stands or the sidelines, sometimes bemused and more often than not, confused. What does it matter to us that one team or the other loses billions or gets the guernsey?

Remember pay television was to bring us more choice in television - and with 29 newly available channels - it arguably has. Pay was also to allow new players try their luck - and many large US media and television companies - News Corp (Foxtel), Bell South/Cable and Wireless (Optus Vision), Telecommunications Inc and CETV (Australis) - have picked up their mallets and trotted onto the field.

But the match is far from over. Coming in the next "chukka" or round are several government inquiries into the current rules that could - in the end - determine who wins. Soon more international satellite channels delivered by Nine, News Corp and other conglomerates will fall over the field washing away the carefully marked out lines and making the boundaries difficult to see. Next year the laws of the televisual landscape will be rewritten by government - who can own what, how to handle locally-available overseas satellite channels, how much local content must be shown on what services, how much costly government television we get, and who gets paid copyright fees for showing programs.

But the most important legislative change on the horizon - given the existing players' uncanny ability to "capture" laws and bend them to their own ends - will be access for genuinely new players who produce or distribute new programs. You could say the government that ensures real access ensures it's the viewer - not big-name players - that wins this game.