Content compliance
Posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 8:44 pm. #
“You might find this rather unusual,” said my guide, ushering me through some doors.
I’d gone to visit Astro, the Malaysian version of BSkyB, to catch up with an old friend and for the chance to look around. Astro runs a ton of radio stations, but I was looking around the television area – seeing lots of monitors and complicated robotic machines that loaded video recorders up with tapes (part of their archival project, I later discovered).
But it was this room that, indeed, I did find rather unusual. There were about thirty desks here, arranged in diagonal formations allowing one person to glance around the other three. Hunched in front of each desk was someone sitting there, watching the television.
“This is our Content Compliance unit,” said my guide – a friendly Indian man.
Malaysia is, rather to my surprise, a muslim country. It doesn’t feel like it in Kuala Lumpur, particularly with the humidity, the high commercialism of the endless shopping malls, and the apparent tolerance of other religions (there was a Cantonese temple at the bottom of the street where the hotel was, for example, and bars abound), but nevertheless, a muslim country.
Accordingly, there are strict rules on what can, and can’t, be shown on television. And, accordingly, nothing can be broadcast on television which is against the country’s law: no swearing, no poor morals, certainly no nudity. The law also requires advertisements to be Malaysian (yes, advertise Coke, but ensure it’s a Malaysian advert for it).
So, the content compliance unit must watch television channels that go out, and substitute advertisements and content where required. A typical shift within the content compliance unit lasts for twelve hours, working on some easy channels (those showing live golf) and some rather harder-to-comply channels (those showing music videos).
Sitting on the side was a booklet containing a list of banned songs. It was a thick document, probably containing two or three thousand songs. I picked it up and had a quick look. I looked under Michael Jackson and Britney Spears – many banned songs for each artist, though none that I instantly recognised. (“If you seek Amy”, the brilliantly-titled new song from la Spears, hadn’t yet made the list.)
What essentially happens is that all channels are placed in a delay; people sit and watch these channels, and substitute – on the fly – content that is not allowed to be shown with content that is.
So, a movie channel that had scheduled Brokeback Mountain might discover that, in Malaysia, it was broadcasting something else at that time. That’s easy. Harder is substituting three-minute music videos, or changing the ad breaks within live business news channels to contain nothing but Malaysian-sold advertising breaks, or promotions for other Astro channels. Harder still to edit an episode of ‘Friends’ to make it conform to muslim behaviour, I’d guess.
“These guys are really important,” said my guide, pointing at the rows of hunched people looking at screens. “At the end of the day, they are responsible for our licence. If they miss something, we’ll go out of business. The entire operation.”
My rather trite comment as we entered of “You’re paying these people to watch telly, basically” was obvious for its shallowness. No. They’re paying these people to keep the whole company operating.
I found it fascinating. Others might find it horrifying. But, Astro weren’t apologetic about what they do, and didn’t hide this from me (in spite of knowing where I work). This is, in my view, a necessary activity to enable Astro to run a successful business in Malaysia and throughout the South Asian subcontinent.
And in reality, this is no different to the censorship actively taken within the US, the home of “Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction” or the almost complete absence of world news. Try and find Al Jazeera on a US cable network, and then tell me censorship doesn’t exist in the ‘land of the free’. And it’s no different to the censorship actively taken within the UK, where we are similarly unable to simply rebroadcast US channels’ advertising, nor able to broadcast various content on our television channels to fit in with our cultural norms. The muslims may have different views; it doesn’t make them wrong.
An interesting day.
A fascinating insight James, and great access. Funny how a country’s borders have extended into a tv control room. I wonder whether you’d ever get to see the equivalent operation in China. Chinese compliance is equally quick-fingered, substituting individual reports from news channels, for example.
My experience of the US cable deals from my time at BBC World News tv would suggest that Al Jazeera and other international news channels struggle to gain carriage largely because of a perceived lack of market viability rather than any calculated censorship. AJ would love to gain carriage in the US and I reckon would happily provide a locally compliant feed in return for the exposure.