Broadcasting services amendment (Media Ownership) Bill 2006 and related bills

To help better explore the potential implications associated with the proposed legislation, we conducted a survey of 919 WA television viewers drawing from our TV Panel of 3000 viewers. Our panel has been recruited from a variety of sources including through lists acquired through marketing research firms, as well as direct mail and newspaper advertising recruitment drives. In many ways, our panel is better informed regarding future possibilities because they participate in regular studies where such scenarios are tested. In this way, the panel is better positioned to understand potential futures

Meeting the digital challenge: reforming Australia's media in the digital age

The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance welcomes the opportunity to make a submission to the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA) in response to the discussion paper on media reform options, MEETING THE DIGITAL CHALLENGE Reforming Australia’s media in the digital age (Discussion Paper)

Promoting Comprehension Strategies of Primary Grade Students Through Datacasting Materials for Distance Learning

Many online learners especially in resource-challenged schools struggled with learning gaps during the pandemic crisis. This study focuses on using cost effective datacasting learning materials for distance education that promote intermediate grade students’ self-regulation, reading and writing skills. Datacasting is the process of delivering computer (IP) data over a traditional television broadcast signal. Locally, where only some households have Internet access but many have television sets, datacasting affords greater learning opportunities. Guided by structure, interactivity, and the functional language teaching theory, this study used sequential explanatory design to explore the role of datacasting in a public elementary school in Cavite in the academic year 2021 to 2022. Analyses of students’ artifacts reveal that their levels ofautonomy are non-autonomous, semi-autonomous, and autonomous. Moreover, the data also show that when they navigated the materials, they used these types of comprehension strategies: preparational, organizational, elaboration, andmonitoring. Correlations between culminating writing activities and final writing scores were found, but are not statistically significant, which may be attributed to the pandemic-induced sample attrition. The results suggest a need to refine the learning materials following the multimedia principles of personalization and embodiment through judicious text choice and adaptation and task design. Pedagogical recommendations for the use of datacasting materials are also offered

Digital radio report

In common with other industrialised countries, the radio industry in Australia is in the midst of a significant transformation. Traditional analogue radio services, broadcasting on AM and FM frequencies, remain popular and continue to attract substantial audiences and revenue. However, the analogue platform is very mature, offering only limited capacity for technical change and development, and FM spectrum is now largely fully occupied in population dense areas. In addition, AM transmissions face growing pressure from urban development and related increasing signal interference. The Australian radio industry therefore retains a strong interest in the opportunities presented by digital radio for service innovation and future growth. To date, digital terrestrial radio services have been licensed for the five mainland state capital cities,1 and trials involving such services are underway in Canberra and Darwin. Within the mainland state capital cities, take up of digital terrestrial radio services continues to grow slowly but steadily with listenership reaching almost 25 per cent in the first quarter of 2015.2 Listenership has benefitted from increased availability of digital radio receivers in motor vehicles (a primary source of listening) and the recent additional rollout of in-fill transmitters increasing coverage of the services in Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. The cost and complexity of rolling out Digital Audio Broadcasting Plus (DAB+)-based digital terrestrial radio services across regional Australia3 present major challenges for the industry. The need to cover large geographic areas with small and dispersed populations offers unique challenges which have not been faced in many international markets. At the same time, Australians are rapidly adopting new types of technology with the growth of online audio platforms such as Spotify and Pandora. These services are complementing the move by traditional radio businesses—most notably the national broadcasters—to deliver radio services online or through mobile apps. The announcement by Apple of a move into the streamed audio market will only increase the choices available to audiences. These services may herald a generational change in listening habits with significant implications for traditional platforms over time. That said, there are ongoing challenges with the bandwidth and data transmission requirements of these services being delivered to large audiences over mobile and wireless platforms. The digital terrestrial radio industry is subject to a range of regulatory requirements in the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (the BSA) and the Radiocommunications Act 1992 (the Radiocommunications Act), which govern matters such as the planning and start up of services, and the sharing of and access to the transmission multiplex in each area. Against the background of changes in the radio industry, this review considers whether changes are required to this framework to provide greater flexibility to the industry and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (the ACMA) to plan for change and ensure that the radio industry is well placed to determine its future strategies for digital services. Key issues examined by the review included: the current state of digital terrestrial radio in Australia, and the impacts of alternative technologies on the industry and listeners; whether Australia should set a digital switchover date for analogue commercial, national, community or other terrestrially transmitted radio services; what legislative/regulatory arrangements should be in place to assist the rollout of digital terrestrial radio services in regional areas; and whether changes are required to the legislative regime for digital radio, including to reduce the regulatory burden on industry

More dominant in their inactivity: consumer response and the adoption of digital TV in Australia

After much hesitation, discussion, and power brokering, Australia adopted digital TV for its Free-to air broadcasting on January 1, 2001. However, by December 2002, only a few thousand homes had adopted the technology. This paper examines the implementation and regulation of digital TV in Australia from the point of view of the &lsquo;established base&rsquo; the new technology will replace, theories on diffusion and innovation of new technologies, and the Justification Model, which sees technology choice as social gambling. It then evaluates the various protectionist regulations and limitations imposed on the technology to safeguard the various stakeholders, the implementation strategies used, lack of digital content, marketing efforts, negative media coverage, and the economic realities of the technology, and argues that if consumers reject the technology altogether, it would lead to Australia missing the future applications of digital technology and the opportunity to address the issue of the &lsquo;digital divide&rsquo; in the 21st century.<br /

A survey of handover algorithms in DVB-H

Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds (DVB-H) is a standard for broadcasting IP Datacast (IPDC) services to mobile handheld terminals. Based on the DVB-T standard, DVB-H adds new features such as time slicing, MPE-FEC, in-depth interleavers, mandatory cell id identifier, optional 4K-modulation mode and the use of 5 MHz bandwidth in addition to the usually used 6, 7, or 8 MHz raster. IPDC over DVB-H is proposed for ETSI to complement the DVB-H standard by combining IPDC and DVB-H in an end-to-end system. Handover in such unidirectional broadcasting networks is a novel issue. In the last few years since the birth of DVB-H technology, great attention has been given to the performance analysis of DVB-H mobile terminals. Handover is one of the main research topics for DVB-H in mobile scenarios. Better reception quality and greater power efficiency are considered to be the main targets of handover research for DVB-H. New algorithms for different handover stages in DVB-H have been the subject of recent research and are currently being studied. Further novel algorithms need to be designed to improve the mobile reception quality. This article provides a comprehensive survey of the handover algorithms in DVB-H. A systematic evaluation and categorization approach is proposed based on the problems the algorithms solve and the handover stages being focused on. Criteria are proposed and analyzed to facilitate designing better handover algorithms for DVB-H that have been identified from the research conducted by the author

Open-standards rich media mobile platform & rapid deployment service creation tool

This paper builds upon the work carried out by Brunel University in the field of "Fast Prototyping And Semi-automated User Interface And Application Generation for Converged Broadcast and Cellular Terminals" [1]. This work involved the development of a service creation application for interactive services on mobile devices and methodologies and tools to speed up and deskill the deployment process. This paper aims at further enhancing these tools and presents an enhanced open standards reference platform for mobile digital TV and rich media services. By using a Scalar Vector Graphics (SVG)-driven Java MIDP application (as opposed to bitmapped raster graphics-driven MHP), rich media services can be broadcast to mobile devices running various Java-supported platforms with a user interface scalable to any screen size. Moreover, the Rich Media Mobile Browser is integrated into a service creation tool, therefore enabling rapid testing and deployment of rich mobile media services. The following sections detail the motivation behind the need for a platform which allows for rich media play-out on mobile devices, along with the rich media mobile viewing application and the tools used to create and test rich media with speed and ease

The Case for the Electromagnetic Commons An Ecocultural Intervention in Australian Spectrum Management

In the globalised world of the electronic, information age, there is one resource that increasingly appears to play a pertinent role in the future of our communications systems. The electromagnetosphere is an ecological region that is largely unacknowledged outside of scientific circles: it is one of those naturally-occurring phenomena that we simply take for granted. But with developments in communications technology we have learnt to tap the energies of this natural phenomenon, and in tum have developed a complex system of management and regulation where a \u27property-mimicking\u27 regime of allocation and licensing is in place. There are movements however, to make the final conversion of \u27spectrum space\u27 into the private hands of media and telecommunications corporations. What effect will this have on our notions of citizenship and democracy? How will this alter our relationship to these corporations, to the electromagnetosphere itself, and our wider relationship within the natural world? Yet there are further complexities in our relationship with the electromagnetosphere as citizens and through government. How do we manage something which is largely invisible to the naked eye? What are the implications of applying the \u27property-mimicking\u27 regimes of land to an ecological sphere which is clearly not solid space? And to what extent is the management and regulation of the electromagnetosphere driven by the dominant trends of \u27enclosure\u27 and \u27privatisation\u27 that are characteristic of landed property? These are some of the questions that stimulate this research. By promoting an ecological and cultural dimension to \u27spectrum management\u27 -an ecoculturalist methodology - this study aims to wrestle the managerial reins of government, regulators, technologists and economists, away from their narrow and anthropocentric world-views, and reclaim the electromagnetosphere for our communities and ecologies. While our conceptualisation of the electromagnetosphere continues to be based on propertied relations, this research will argue that a \u27commons property regime\u27 would be the most appropriate for accommodating the wider democratic and ecological concerns of our communities. This is therefore an intervention and an argument for the \u27electromagnetic commons\u27

NASA Tech Briefs, November 2013

Topics include: Cryogenic Liquid Sample Acquisition System for Remote Space Applications; 5 Spatial Statistical Data Fusion (SSDF); GPS Estimates of Integrated Precipitable Water Aid Weather Forecasters; Integrating a Microwave Radiometer into Radar Hardware for Simultaneous Data Collection Between the Instruments; Rapid Detection of Herpes Viruses for Clinical Applications; High-Speed Data Recorder for Space, Geodesy, and Other High-Speed Recording Applications; Datacasting V3.0; An All-Solid-State, Room-Temperature, Heterodyne Receiver for Atmospheric Spectroscopy at 1.2 THz; Stacked Transformer for Driver Gain and Receive Signal Splitting; Wireless Integrated Microelectronic Vacuum Sensor System; Fabrication Method for LOBSTER-Eye Optics in Silicon; Compact Focal Plane Assembly for Planetary Science; Fabrication Methods for Adaptive Deformable Mirrors; Visiting Vehicle Ground Trajectory Tool; Workflow-Based Software Development Environment; Mobile Thread Task Manager; A Kinematic Calibration Process for Flight Robotic Arms; Magnetostrictive Alternator; Bulk Metallic Glasses and Composites for Optical and Compliant Mechanisms; Detection of Only Viable Bacterial Spores Using a Live/Dead Indicator in Mixed Populations; and Intravenous Fluid Generation System