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Any person wishing to provide a datacasting service,
including commercial and national broadcasters, must
hold a datacasting licence.
Only Australian companies, the national broadcasters,
Government bodies or a body corporate established under
Australian law for a public purpose may hold a datacasting
licence.
An applicant seeking a datacasting licence must use
the application Form ABA 51: Application for a datacasting
licence (download an RTF
or PDF file)-
and pay the specified application fee.
Please contact the
ABA for a register of all datacasting licence holders.
Datacasting licence conditions
Datacasters are subject to television program genre
restrictions and audio content restrictions which are
designed to encourage them to provide a range of services
that are different from traditional broadcasting services.
The types of programs caught by the genre conditions
include, drama, sports, music, infotainment or lifestyle,
documentary and 'reality television'. These are called
Category A programs. There are also restrictions on
Category B programs which include news or current affairs
programs, financial, market or business information
bulletins and weather bulletins. However, there are
some qualifications to the genre restrictions which
allow datacasters to provide short extracts of Category
A and B programs.
The audio content conditions are intended to prevent
datacasters from transmitting matter which would be
regarded as a traditional radio program.
Internet carriage services and ordinary electronic
mail are not subject to the genre or audio conditions,
although provisions have been included to prevent the
use of Internet carriage services to avoid the genre
or audio conditions. There are also provisions for exempting
certain content copied from the Internet from the genre
or audio conditions.
Datacasters will be able to provide some services without
any restrictions.These include:
- information-only programs (including those enabling
people to carry out transactions)
- educational programs
- interactive computer games
- Internet content
- electronic mail
- Parliamentary broadcasts
- content in the form of text or still images
- electronic program guides, and
- advertising or sponsorship material.
Aspirant datacasters should carefully read the relevant
sections in Schedule 6 to the Broadcasting
Services Act 1992 to determine whether their proposed
service meets the content requirements.
Other general conditions relating to content on datacasting
services also apply. These can be found in clause 24
of Schedule 6 to the Broadcasting
Services Act.
Other characteristics of datacasting
licences
Datacasting licences have the following characteristics:
- they are issued without any entitlement to a transmitter
licence
- they have no expiry date, ie they are issued in
perpetuity
- there is no specified licence area within which
the service has to be provided
- there are no foreign ownership restrictions or other
restrictions on ownership and control of the licences
Transfer of datacasting licences
The datacaster must advise the ABA of the transfer
within 7 days.
Datacasting transmitter
licences
A datacasting transmitter licence allows the transmission
of licensed datacasting services. Datacasting transmitter
licences are a new form of apparatus licence issued
under the Radiocommunications
Act 1992 and are allocated by the Australian
Communications Authority through a price-based system.
Datacasting transmitter licences will have a term of
10 years with the expectation of a single renewal of
five years only. They cannot be controlled by a commercial
television broadcaster or a national broadcaster.
The datacasting licence and the datacasting transmitter
licence may be held by different people.
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