Asia's TV regulators can't ignore the threat of online piracy
John Medeiros calls for a 'light touch' approach to censorship and control
The international television industry is meeting in Hong Kong for its annual Asian conference. This is a US$53 billion industry that has grown from nothing in the past 20 years, but it is facing an uncertain future - largely because while the industry is trying to live in the present and prepare for the future, Asian governments are living in the past.
In every Asian market, there are now competing free- and pay-TV services. But governments continue to approach this type of broadcasting as if we were living in the 1950s - with limited bandwidth and a small number of free-to-air licensees, providing programming aimed at a common-denominator mass market.
The reality, of course, is different: the number of channels available to most homes is now measured in hundreds, and audiences are fragmenting, seeking special-interest programmes. In wired markets like Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea, consumers are choosing TV services that allow them to see what they want when they want on the device they want.
The internet has become a massive TV distribution network - mostly for unpaid pirated programming, but also for a few (in Asia) legitimate TV services.
But governments are still acting as if it were important to control the world of linear broadcasting even as people migrate to other forms of viewing. They pretend censorship of pay-TV content is effective, as if it were not easy for consumers to go online and find uncut versions. This gives a push to piracy (as the uncensored versions are usually pirated ones) and it entices consumers into the netherworld of internet bottom-feeders who advertise and support piracy websites.
This needs to change, and the changes should come on both the "demand" and "supply" sides.
Governments should seek to channel demand for TV and movies to legitimate, authorised, taxpaying content supply routes. The massive growth of internet piracy must be stemmed.
Hong Kong's own efforts to amend its Copyright Ordinance to cope with the "digital world" have been bogged down for years, and the state of the law - based on the concept of "making pirate copies" rather than online piracy - is woefully inadequate. The current amendments need to be passed as a first step, but then the government needs to quickly assess what to do next.
On the other side, supply of content needs to be nearly as deregulated on pay-TV networks as it is on the internet. This is not a major problem in Hong Kong, which has a relatively "light touch" regulatory system, but that is not the case in other Asian markets. Pay-TV networks should be freed from archaic regulations, inequitable censorship controls and unfair tax burdens which are not levied on online content supply.
The obstacles to more rational policies on TV to cope with a changing world are, of course, political. Bureaucracies, interest groups and, in some cases, competing industry interests push for more control. But the rise and proliferation of the online piracy ecosystem now presents the very real possibility that growth of the TV industry could be choked off. We can already see that the goose that is laying the golden egg for tax revenue, employment generation and creative industry stimulus is starting to gasp for breath.
In another few years, Asia could find itself with domestic production hollowed out, as everybody watches pirate TV streamed over the internet from outside the region. It's not a pretty picture.
