Australia’s film industry could dramatically increase its competitiveness through the National Broadband Network (NBN), according to Tony Clark, chairman at South Australian digital animation studio Rising Sun Pictures.
Speaking at the Federal Government’s inquiry into the role and potential of the NBN, Clark said high-speed broadband would enable animation studios to avoid high overheads required to source and relocate skills.
According to Clark, Rising Sun commonly relocated people from areas such as rural Tasmania and NSW to Adelaide at an average cost of $5000 per employee, but high-speed broadband would allow staff to work from anywhere in the country, avoiding this cost.
“We have pockets of artists all around Australia and rather than sticking them in aeroplanes and flying them here, we could be working with them as individuals or small clusters… in order to that you need mechanisms such as cineSync and affordable broadband… and reasonable speeds and predictable quality of service, predictable availability of bandwidth and predictable latency,” he said.
“That’s where fibre is important. You are either going to be pushing a 200GB data set… to a person to work on or you are going to be remoting a screen in our office to that person and both of those need high bandwidth.”
cineSync is a synchronised media player developed by Rising Sun which allows for remote collaboration on digital media.
Commenting on the ability of the Australian film production sector to compete internationally, Clark said high-speed broadband would provide “enormous opportunities” to work with people wherever they were.
“Having effective high-speed connectivity to people all around Australia [will precipitate] a whole new digital effects universe model where instead of having 140 people in our building we may have 90 people in our building and have 80 people splashed around the rest of the world or Australia,” he said.
In related news, Internode has used the Adelaide NBN hearing to rebuff claims made by Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, that the ISP’s concerns around the National Broadband Network (NBN)’s proposed Points of Interconnect (POI) should have been voiced earlier.
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