Ms Celene Craig:

Community television and radio is very important to the BAI. It is a fundamental aspect of our licensing strategy of ensuring diversity not only in the type of content available to audiences but the source of that content. The BAI has been very supportive, through the sound and vision scheme and through our own sectoral development programme, of the Community Television Association. We do offer support in that way.

The issue of carriage on free-to-air services is one of cost and trying to find some way of deciding who will bear that cost. The requirement that audiences can access services on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms is embedded in the legislation currently but there is a very heavy cost associated with television broadcasting on the digital terrestrial system. Up to now, there has not been any way of overcoming that. There has been success in terms of the cable service here but nobody has found a solution to how the cost for carriage on terrestrial television can be borne. The question remains as to where the funding that would be required to support such broadcasting might come from. That funding would not be inconsiderable, even on a cost-only basis. It is fair to say that the digital terrestrial system runs on a cost model that has been approved by ComReg. There is a regulated tariff structure that is operated and approved by the commission. It is not a simple problem to overcome.

Quite honestly, working within that model would involve a requirement to find a central source of funding in order to be able to support the carriage of the existing community television services on the DTT platform.