Future of Australian Television Part I: The Terrestrial TV Endgame

This report examines the transmission-and-spectrum question at the heart of Australian free-to-air television's future. For free-to-air broadcasting, what happens to the digital terrestrial television (DTT) platform and the UHF frequencies it occupies is not one issue among many – it determines the platform's cost base, its reach, and ultimately its viability. Content obligations, prominence rules and ownership changes are best understood as context that changes the payoffs on the transmission choice rather than as separable questions. The analysis sets out the four ways the terrestrial platform can evolve; traces how the 2020 Media Reform Green Paper posed the spectrum question, and how the reforms that have since landed reshaped its payoffs without resolving it; and compares Australia's position with Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the European Union through the transmission-and-spectrum lens. It concludes that Australia has become the outlier mainstream on content regulation, yet alone among its close regulatory peers in having no published plan for its terrestrial endgame. A companion report carries the argument forward into integrated market scenarios to 2035 and their strategic implications.