The 1990s have been a decade of television in the Asia Pacific. During this decade, television – in all its forms ranging from terrestrial and cable to satellite – has firmly established itself as the most pervasive and dominant mass medium in the world’s largest and the most populous region. And there is no end in sight yet: colour television sets are the highest selling consumer electronic item in the region (with personal computer in the second place) and the region’s multitude of manufa–cturers cannot produce TV sets as fast as they are snatched up.
 
Yet, even as the audiences expand and the amount of programming increases at unprecedented rates, media researchers have pointed out the growing anomalies and imbalances in television’s content and uses. As elsewhere, entertainment and news programming dominate the airwaves, sometimes to the exclusion of educational and public interest content. The space and time available for public service broadcasting has been shrinking in most countries – even government owned channels no longer assign sufficient resources and priority to this aspect of broadcasting.

 
Thus, the Asia Pacific region is experiencing a paradox where the public service component on television is declining while the number of broadcast hours and channels continues to increase. The medium’s potential for non-formal education and for raising public awareness remain largely untapped or inhibited. While advertisers and sponsors seem to be competing with each other to support entertainment, news or sports programmes, the more serious programmes – documentaries, investigative current affairs prog-rammes or indepth interviews – have to contend with budget cuts, intense competition for prime time and an overall decline in the public service spirit in broadcasting.
  
Faced with this depressing situation, yet undaunted by it, some to promote public service broadcasting within the new realities of the Asia Pacific audio-visual landscape.
 
Foremost among these groups is the network of Video Resource Centres (VRCs) affiliated with the International Television Trust for the Environment (TVE).
 
TVE has been covering real life on earth during the past 15 years. TVE was set up in 1984 as a non-profit alliance of Carlton Television (then Central TV) of the UK, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
 
Video Resource Centre (VRC) is the generic name used to describe TVE’s national level partner organisations. They are TVE’s eyes and ears on the ground; they extend TVE’s outreach many times and form a mutually beneficial partnership with the global organisation.
 
VRCs are existing indigenous organisations engaged in environmental education, awareness and activism. They are committed to using audio visual media – Television and video – in their work. While most VRCs are non-governmental organisations (NGOs), some are semi-governmental institutions or non-profit arms of private production companies. Whatever their status, they are non-profit making by nature, are engaged in environmental awareness raising, and share TVE’s mission of using audio visual media in the public interest and for public education in the broadest sense.
 
By end 1998, TVE had formed VRC partnerships with over 60 organisations in 50 countries in the Asia Pacific, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In each country, a VRC partner is selected after a thorough process of scrutiny and negotiations, following meetings with a number of candidate organisations. TVE then signs a VRC agreement with the selected partner, formally licensing the latter to distribute TVE’s wide range of outstanding films on environment and development within the country or territory.
 
There is no ‘typical’ VRC: each one is encouraged to develop programme activities to respond to the particular needs of its community and country. Because of this, VRC activities vary considerably from country to country. The main VRC activities include the following:

n making lingua franca, national and major dialect language versions of foreign environment films in order to make the films more accessible to local audiences;

§ adapting foreign films in other suitable ways (e.g. ‘topping and tailing’);
§ producing their own films on a wide range of environment and development issues;
§ marketing and promoting both their own productions and versions, to local TV broadcasters, and many non-broadcast users (schools, NGOs, industry government agencies);
§ organising events and activities using films as a main element (seminars, conferences, workshops, film festivals, public screening, etc.); and
§ gathering information on audio visual productions and activities related to environment and disseminating this information through appropriate print (film catalogues, newsletters, bulletins) and electronic (web sites) means.
 
During the past few years, TVE has been able to develop a network of active VRC partners. VRCs are not local branches or offices of TVE; neither are they franchise-holders. VRCs are independent partners with their own management structures, objectives, specific constituencies as well as their own sources of funding and support. The partnership with TVE is based on sharing ideals, objectives, resources and credit. Working with and through VRCs, TVE is able to reach users and audiences many times larger than what it could reach directly. In this sense, VRCs are strong multipliers of TVE’s outreach, and they in turn use TVE’s films to strengthen the capacity of other multipliers at the national level. q

An Extract from the Report
"Harnessing Television’s Power to Communicate for Sustainable Development" 
by TVE Asia Regional Office, Sri Lanka

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