Interactive television is also an important trigger for creativity. If we are able to develop new services, drawn from local and regional content and delivered by free interactive television to households all around Australia, we will be providing an unprecedented incubator for creative talent all around Australia. Programs produced in local and regional areas will be able to find local audiences and showcase opportunities for national audiences. Inevitably, the most successful will migrate to platforms where they are available to larger audiences. Interactive television could provide the platform for decades of regional creativity in Australia.
Interactive television is a hybrid medium.
It grows out of broadcasting and online. Its full potential will be reached if it is able to explore this new cross-breed of programming. I note in passing that the universities are brimming with students about to graduate with degrees in multimedia who will be able to turn this new medium into its own discipline. I remind you that this has happened in the past - radio learnt from newspaper before it developed as its own medium with its own routines, approaches and protocols. Similarly television emerged out of radio before it too found its own definition.