The youth-focused channel SBS Viceland will feature diverse non-Anglo-Celtic content that is not a departure from its multicultural charter, SBS management has said.
SBS was forced to defend its partnership with the global media company Vice to rebrand the SBS2 channel after it was accused of abandoning its charter by former ABC chairman Maurice Newman.
SBS is launching SBS Viceland on TV and online platforms on 15 November, replacing SBS2.
Owned and operated by SBS, it will be programmed with content from the US-Canadian media company Vice as well as popular SBS2 programs The Feed, If You Are the One and PopAsia.
The director of TV and online content at SBS, Marshall Heald, said Newman was “just patently incorrect” to say SBS had lost a reason to exist.
“The critics just don’t really understand that in actual fact Vice is producing linguistically and culturally diverse content with a really distinct tone,” Heald told Guardian Australia.
“If you look across the thousands of hours they’re making it is very closely aligned with what SBS is trying to achieve. They’re trying to make content which is personal and all about trying to get young people to understand the world in which they exist.”
Heald said the channel would not be a feed of the Vice cable channel but would “cherrypick” the best of its culture, music, travel, food, sport and news content for Australian audiences. There was even scope for Vice to produce local Australian content with SBS in the future.
SBS2, which started in 2009, is largely an acquisitions channel that commissioned only 10 hours of local content last year on top of its in-house program The Feed. As a secondary channel, SBS2 doesn’t have the budget to commission significant amounts of local content.
Heald said SBS as a whole was still strongly multicultural, pointing to the SBS on demand platform, which has 900 movies – 90% of which are in languages other than English.
“Even the content which Viceland is producing in the US is incredibly diverse,” he said. “The idea that because they are in the US they are producing Anglo-Celtic content is just factually incorrect.
“I am a passionate defender of SBS and the fact is we are producing more multicultural and more multilingual content than ever before. I am extremely proud of the shows we’ve been commissioning on the main channel whether it’s fiction shows like The Principal and Family Law and factual series like DNA Nation.
“The terms of the arrangement we have is as Viceland expands around the world – moving into 44 territories – our output arrangement will include content from around the globe including content in languages other than English. So from France, Germany, the Middle East.
The chairman of the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA), Joseph Caputo, said he thought it was a good move on the part of SBS because Vice provided “cutting-edge programs from around the world and some of the best of youth culture”, which would expand the youth audience of SBS.
“I would hope that it fits within the charter of SBS and that SBS continues to provide rich multicultural, multilingual and diverse programs – in this case for youth,” he said.
“I believe that this is the right move and will be good for Australian youth and multiculturalism generally.”
The host of The Feed, Marc Fennell, wrote a passionate post on his personal blog defending the partnership with Vice from accusations it was part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire because 21st Century Fox bought a 5% share in Vice Media.
“No precious publicly owned spectrum is being auctioned off to Uncle Rupert,” Fennell said. “We are creating something new out of two broadcasters that have an incredible amount in common.”
However, Fennell did concede the arrangement seemed at first to be an “odd fit”. “Except when you see the content you will realise that the whole goal of Viceland is to explore a multicultural world through the prisms of music, sex, the environment, film, food and more.
“It’s globally focused, it’s diverse, it’s fun and defiantly open-minded journalism and entertainment.
“Frankly, this move will bring SBS2 far more in line with our charter than some of our existing content. Certainly not ‘losing our way’ as some have suggested.”
