The Australian new media market is quaking.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the Australian media landscape is in flux as never before. So great are the shifts taking place in technology, business and regulation that one commentator refers to the situation as "motion blur," meaning that the minute an observer believes he or she has a fix on it, it changes again. 

As O’Reilly’s zenlike summation of the Australian new-media industry reveals, the old Hollywood aphorism that "no one knows anything" can easily be applied to the entertainment sector Down Under. "The only real conclusion is that we know a great deal about what we don’t know," he says.

As co-creator of Virtual Reality Modeling Language, the Internet’s first 3-D interface, U.S. native Mark Pesce is more than a little hip to the brave new digital environment. He lectures on new media at the Australian Film Television and Radio School and believes that "DVB-H is the new frontier."

 

"It’s not about a box in the living room but the box in your hand that’s receiving a signal," Pesce says. "I think there’s going to be an enormous market there for channels which are special-interest: business, sports (and other) things that will deal with micro-markets."

But while Seven believes that mobile telephony could prove effective in delivering news and sports to a wider audience, the network is more cynical about it doing so for dramas.

 

"Do people want to watch ‘Desperate Housewives’ and ‘Lost’ on widescreen TV or a mobile telephone? We suspect that people prefer to watch television on a television," Francis says. "Will our content migrate beyond television and into new forms of communication? That has always been the case and will continue to be the case."