Aust, satellites to restrict TV cover

Press, 9 December 1983, Page 4

Aust, satellites to restrict TV cover

NZPA staff correspondent Sydney

New Zealanders hoping to use backyard dish antennae to pick up Australian television programmes from the new Aussat satellites to be launched in 1985, will have to think again. The satellite’s beam will be restricted to cover only Australia, and will not normally reach New Zealand, said a spokesman for the Communications Department in Canberra yes-

In any event, the only programmes anyone in either country would be able to pick up would be the Government-owned A.B.C. network. Commercial transmissions will be scrambled so

that only regional Australian television stations will be able to receive and decode them. Two satellites are to be launched from a United States space shuttle late in 1985, and a third to be kept on the ground in reserve and to be launched later, at a total cost of SNZ336 million.

Apart from other business traffic, one of the satellites will be used to beam one television and two radio channels — all Government networks — direct to outback communities which at the moment have no access to either. The second satellite will beam all the traffic from the three commercial television stations in Sydney to

regional TV stations round Australia, where they will choose what they want to televise to their viewers.

“Two main principles are involved in that Government decision,” said the department spokesman. “One is to protect the local character of telecasts ,in inland cities which would not be able to compete with three Sydney stations.

“The other is to prevent the control of virtually all television in Australia being concentrated in the hands of the three main private media groups.” A tribunal hearing to set the rules, standards and guidelines covering the use of the satellites will begin in May. ___