The National Broadband Network (NBN) is set to level the media's playing field, and that's good and bad.
We'll all have the ability to become broadcasters, with no need for licences and expensive infrastructure. Innovations such as YouTube have already given us a taste of that, and how 'citizen' media can contribute to our flourishing as human beings and communities.
But because our media world will be flooded with content from overseas, our distinctive Australian culture will be threatened. This has occurred with state and regional cultures in recent decades, as nationally networked content has become the norm. State based football now receives little media coverage compared with the past.
In the future we'll source the majority of our media content from the NBN rather than broadcast towers and newspaper vendors. The media industry as we know it will die if it fails in its various attempts to reinvent itself.
The end of big media businesses such as Seven, Nine, Ten and the newspapers would be bad for media proprietors such as Kerry Stokes and Rupert Murdoch, but not necessarily a great loss at all for the rest of us, given the NBN's empowerment of small media enterprises and the diversity that implies.
However it also provides an uncertain future for the ABC and SBS, which exist largely to promote Australian culture and identity.
Earlier this year, ABC managing director Mark Scott sounded the alarm at a forum of commercial and public sector broadcasters:
'In the short term, in the next couple of years it looks pretty good. People are still watching television ... But if you take a longer-term view, when the NBN is here and you are battling global content, where there's seamless distribution and endless content available, that's where you have got to be quite paranoid ... and you have to be positioning yourself quite aggressively now for the uncertainties of that world.'
The Federal Government's Convergence Review report released last week provides a blueprint for media policy in the NBN era. Its vision includes many radical changes including a 50 per cent increase in Australian content obligations for commercial free to air television operators.
More compulsory locally-produced programming will diminish the currently healthy earnings of the television networks. But broadcasting a substantial amount of local content will provide them with a point of difference that will potentially cushion them against competition from foreign content providers.
Australian programs are costly to produce, but it has been demonstrated