Press Release 24 July 2008
Today the myEPG team issued its first press release announcing the launch of the campaign. The release can be seen here.
MyEPG Goes Public - Petition Signatories Grow Quickly
Wow! Less than 24 hours after going live signatories to the MyEPG petition already number well over the 300 mark and continue to grow steadily.
News travels fast, and there are threads on a number of sites including IceTV, DVBOwners, DTVForum and The Green Button. In addition, Mike Hancock was quoted in the Age (here) and on iTWire here as a spokesman for the campaign. Keep the support coming people and together we will become an overwhelming force!
Sources close to the campaign suggest that a press release is imminent and hopefully that will generate further interest!
Contact with the ACMA
Well as my mother said, there is never any point just starting with a fight, always ask nicely first!
As such, one of our first moves was to contact the Australian Media and Communication Authority (ACMA) and ask them about changing guide criteria via code or licence conditions. Unfortunately they have been unable or unwilling to consider the request without first seeing a “market failure”. This means we need to demonstrate that the current situation is really not working before they will listen much, let alone do anything.
Most of the feedback the ACMA get is from FreeTV Australia, the group that represents the FTA TV broadcasters. No wonder the feedback is all good on the EPG issue, its what they want - control. The problem is that no other group of any consequence exists to provide the other side of the EPG story in Australia. Quite honestly we don’t want the job, but when it’s broken like it is now, what choice do we have, someone has to stand up and be counted.
So, we do need to go ahead with the letter and petition campaign, the ACMA has told us as such, ie “no action without demonstrated market failure”, so we need to tell them its failing.
Project really starts to take shape
Well as the Project Manager for this campaign I can say thats it great to see everything starting to take shape. The fully volunteer myEPG team have put in many many hours of effort to get us to this stage. A truly fantastic effort that just goes to show the passion everyone has.
So the next stage is the launch of the site when we get to see what people think of our efforts and we get to see if the campaign will gain traction.