At the ABC, we have a pretty clear idea of what our job is and how we do it.
We help you digest the latest news. We make drama, documentaries and comedies for you and your kids. We help you find the best new music. And we're there in the classroom, helping to educate the next generation.
In fact, we've been doing a lot of these things for many decades. This week, the ABC celebrates its 90th birthday.
But the world is constantly evolving, so what's next? In 10 years' time, what will the ABC look like – and how might we be serving Australians?
Our team, Innovation Lab, thinks about these kinds of big questions a lot.
Here are five major trends that could determine how the ABC informs, educates and entertains in 2032.
1. Harnessing the algorithm will become more important
AI has the potential to transform how organisations work. The ABC is no different.
Look, we're not about to replace Patricia Karvelas with a sentient robot. And it's not clear a machine could ever learn to pull off a live cross as perfect as Tony Armstrong's after the Socceroos made the World Cup.
Instead, AI will help us work smarter and more efficiently and make the content we produce easier for you to find and enjoy.
One of the ways this might happen could be through virtual voice and text-to-speech technology.
Imagine you're getting ready for work in the morning. You want to check the top few stories on the ABC News home page but you don't have time to stop and read.
We could offer you the option to listen to the article instead. But rather than the audio being physically recorded by a person each day, it is read by a virtual voice, which has been trained using a machine learning algorithm to read English and speak in a human voice. You could even pick the voice you prefer, adjust the speed of the read, or even choose to listen to the story translated into another language.
If you want to hear the early results of our team's work on this project, check out ABC Sydney's Sarah Macdonald – who kindly donated her voice to help train the AI – interviewing a bot version of herself.
Another place where virtualisation will change the way we work is in TV production. Virtual production, a process using game engines to create virtual sets and blend them with physical action, is quickly making filming cheaper, faster and more nimble.
We used some virtual graphical backdrops during our election night broadcast in May, and when the pandemic quashed travel plans for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the BBC just stayed in Salford – but used a 3D real-time rendered backdrop to make it look like Tokyo.
"There is also an interesting example of using deep fakes in production that France Télévisions did," says Lalya Gaye, coordinator of the AI and Data Initiative at the European Broadcasting Union.
"One of the actresses for a TV series wasn't available for the last scenes. So they were able to replace her with another actress, then they were able to put her face on top of [the stand-in]."
2. Declining trust in the media will be a challenge
While Australians' trust in the media is strong compared to other countries, it has been declining in recent years and particularly during the pandemic.
This is a trend we see in other places. In the US, political polarisation has led to two sharply different media ecosystems and, in the case of vaccines or the January 6 insurrection, an inability to agree on even basic facts.
The ABC is a trusted source of news and information but we can't ignore this trend.
It has its roots in the weaponisation of the term "fake news" by politicians and the spread of misinformation and disinformation online, including by media outlets themselves.
In the coming years, news publishers like the ABC will need to be more cognisant of how disinformation campaigns work and how they erode trust in media and democracy.
"One thing that I have been trying to push for is our political press needs to become more aggressively and explicitly pro-truth, pro-participation [and] pro-democracy," says Jay Rosen, a press critic and associate professor of journalism at NYU.
"Without being embarrassed by it or trying to hide these commitments. They have to use them to land on the voters' side."
3. We'll need to prepare for the metaverse (whatever it becomes)
Full disclosure: the metaverse doesn't exist yet. At least not in the way Mark Zuckerberg is talking about it.
Last year, as Zuckerberg announced his company would rebrand from Facebook to Meta, he unveiled his vision for this next frontier of digital life.
You could strap on your VR headset or smart glasses and join your friend in a virtual bar. Have a work meeting in a virtual office. See your favourite artist in a virtual venue and buy an NFT as digital merch.
There are still a lot of unknowns. As Zuckerberg himself admits, some of the technology to make this a reality does not yet exist. Internet data capacity would have to greatly increase. And there's a question of what metaverse experts call "interoperability". If Meta builds one digital space, and Google builds another, can the dress your digital avatar wears in one be carried into the other?
In any case, the beginnings of this vision – a seamless integration of the physical world and the virtual – are already around us. Think Snapchat or Instagram filters, or AR apps that can let you place furniture in your home before you buy it.
That's why organisations like the ABC need to be "metaverse-ready", says Sofie Hvitved, head of media at the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies.
"We have to change our perception of reality," she says.
"Virtual reality, for young people, is equally real and has the same, or even sometimes more, value and is the place where they can feel more like themselves."
She says the metaverse tends to be ridiculed as an idea, particularly when it is lumped in with falling crypto prices and the hype around NFTs.
But we should think more about the direction audiences are headed – towards virtual experiences, and immersive environments in areas like gaming – and not any specific company or technology.
"The famous way of looking at this is: if Ford had asked people what they wanted, they wanted faster horses.
"Sometimes it's difficult to see these solutions."
4. There will be devices, devices and more devices (and smart cars)
For much of the past 90 years, the ABC has delivered stories and experiences to you via two main devices: the radio and the TV.
But since we started publishing on the internet in the 1990s, the number of places you'll find us has grown. You can now access our content on phones, computers, tablets and other connected devices.
That includes connected cars.
"Cars are changing, dashboards are changing," says Eli Sessions, distribution manager at the BBC.
"Most of the knobs that you remember from the dashboard are gone and replaced with a smooth glass screen."
Like the BBC, the ABC has been a go-to in the car for many people for decades. That radio button was prominent and there weren't a lot of options to choose from.
"Now, as cars turn into what some people say are smartphones on wheels, there's a risk that the BBC and other broadcasters simply become one app among many."
For that reason, our team has been researching the future of ABC audio in cars.
How do we make that listening experience both personalised for you and seamless (so you don't spend 10 minutes before you start the car figuring out what to listen to)? Should it change the way our stories sound, or how they appear?
And it's not just cars.
Twenty-six per cent of Australians 12 and over own a smart speaker, according to a 2021 report by Edison Research. That's up from 17 per cent the previous year.
We're working towards a future where voice agents like Siri and Alexa play a greater role, allowing for more screen-free interactions when you want things like podcasts, news updates or live radio.
The majority of Australian adults also own a smart TV, offering them access to numerous streaming services.
All of this means there has been a lot of fragmentation when it comes to how people connect with the ABC.
In the next 10 years, the ABC will need to be in all of these places and more (on gaming devices, in VR-connected spaces, on internet-connected devices not yet invented).
We will also need to continue serving audiences who don't want or can't afford the latest devices or who, importantly, live in the many parts of Australia that have poor-quality or no internet.
For example, AM radio continues to be robust technology that is extremely useful when it comes to providing emergency information.
Figuring out how to do all of this well, while keeping an eye on what's coming next, will be a continuing challenge.
5. The rise of the creator economy will continue
We think of the ABC as part of "the media", a loose pack of organisations – Nine, News Corp, SBS, etc – who produce and distribute content.
But that term is a little rubbery these days. Like the devices we use, the media ecosystem itself has become fragmented.
The explosion of social media in the past 15 years has meant anybody can create media content for free and distribute it widely.
Increasingly, that creator economy has become sophisticated, valuable and influential – in some ways, more influential than the big organisations we think of as "the media".
As that sophistication grows, the creator economy will play a bigger role in how the ABC operates.
Our team runs something called the Talent Fund, which allows the ABC to experiment with how new talent, working only on our third-party digital platforms, can help us connect with younger audiences.
You might have seen, for example, Dr Naomi Koh Belic talking about mould on Instagram or Harry Jun discussing Playstation's State of Play on YouTube.
The Talent Fund helps us deliver the right kinds of content to audiences in the spaces where they spend their time.
"When it comes to digital, you will always have that super long tail of content; you will always have very specific, very niche bits of content that people want," says Alan Soon, co-founder of Splice Media, which supports media start-ups in Asia.
"When I say niche, it doesn't mean it is small, but it is just hyper-focused on what a segment of people want.
"The internet will always be this and this will be more obvious over the next five years."
When it comes to news, Soon says media outlets like the ABC need to pay close attention to where the creator economy is going, including the way it intersects with political coverage.
"I think it is very easy for us to assume that this is not in our wheelhouse because this is not journalism with a capital J," he says.
"But the fact is a lot of creators in this space have a much bigger footprint than we understand. They have more influence, they have a bigger ability to engage with audiences and to sway opinion."
There are other things, too
Think about how fast technology changed in the past 10 years.
These are five big trends, but there will be other seismic shifts coming our way – we haven't even touched on the impact of climate change or the shift to remote work.
The ABC, and every one of us, will have to navigate these changes. For our team, it's not all about trying to predict the future but also accepting change and looking for the opportunities it presents.
We'll keep doing that so we can keep Australians informed, educated and entertained wherever they are.
