In Australia, the ABC isn’t the only game in town; SBS is also a public service broadcaster (and also needs to go cap-in-hand to the government for funding every few years).

The SBS runs two television services (launching SBS Two recently at the advent of digital television); and also runs a number of radio services.

Tune into SBS (TV or radio) during the day, and chances are, you’ll not understand what on earth is going on; because SBS carries a wonderful collection of foreign language radio and television programmes. Australia is a country full of immigrants, after all, and SBS is made for all Australians; from the Polish community, eager to discover what’s going on in Warsaw or Poznan, to the Portuguese community, more interested in Lisbon or Oporto. SBS caters for these communities, in a jarring collection of 68 languages. The radio services reach half a million people (not a bad figure for Australia), but you’d be pretty impressively multilingual if you listened for longer than half an hour at most times of the day.

After a chat and a lasagne in the SBS cafe with Dirk Anthony, Trevor Long – introduced as “our Nick Piggott” much to my chagrin – shows me round the studios in North Sydney. With the click of a mouse button, producers can publish their programmes to the web as well as to the playout system. I walk past a large amount of small studios, where much of the radio programming comes from, and descend into the bowels of the building, where I see a number of curiously deskless studios (where the entire output is controlled by a touchscreen Klotz system).

SBS broadcasts two channels in the major metropolitan areas of Australia, and one channel everywhere else. They’re using DAB+ to offer additional, time-shifted versions of their channels (and a full 24-hour relay of the BBC World Service), and a couple of days ago launched two new services: a world music channel and a channel filling a niche for chinese pop music. Preparations were underway for their launch when I was being shown round, with Trevor justifiably proud of the low-cost way they’d engineered them.

SBS provides genuinely appointment-to-listen radio. It’s clear that the output of SBS is stuff that an electronic programme guide was invented for; and while on-demand listening will make it easier for people to consume their content, the real benefit will be dependent on a great electronic programme guide and a way of recording the programme you want to listen to. In terms of the recording, EPG-capabilities of new platforms, there are clear benefits to SBS; the question is whether commercial radio is similarly keen.

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