NOT KIDDING AROUND Australian–Asian Children’s Television Co-productions
Australia has consistently produced high-quality screen content for children, with some of the country’s best television series – from Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, which aired from 1968 to 1970, to today’s Bluey1 – having been broadcast, and now streamed, around the world. From a local policy perspective, children (generally referring, in industry terms, to persons under fourteen years of age) have been considered a ‘special audience’, easily influenced by what they see on screen.2 Within the landscape of television, therefore, children’s programming has experienced high levels of regulation since the late 1970s, most saliently in the form of the content quotas enshrined in the Children’s Television Standards (CTS) first introduced in 1979 and updated in 2009.3 But the rigorous scrutiny and regulation that attends to children’s media engagement, along with the related imperatives to defend and support original, distinctly Australian content for this audience, operate in a landscape in which the consumption of screen media has changed considerably. The introduction of digital transmission in 2001 resulted in a fragmentation of audience and advertising revenue, which was exacerbated by children’s programming already being available on pay TV as well; over the decade that followed, this was further complicated by the rise to prominence of web-based streaming (YouTube) and on-demand services (such as Netflix).
Media academics Anna Potter and Jeanette Steemers point out that ‘[w]hile the internet has facilitated a proliferation in children’s media offerings and platforms, television remains the dominant medium in At the same time, because children’s content is expensive to produce and restrictions on advertising during children’s programs mean that the rate of return on a children’s series is often unviable, there is little commercial incentive for local broadcasters to produce original children’s content. One way Australian producers have tackled this obstacle is by reaching out to East Asian screen industries for collaboration.
