Anna Potter
Biographic Data
| ID | 3674339 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anna Potter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anna |
| FAMILY NAME | Potter |
| SIGNATURE | POTTER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Sunshine Coast |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0475-8172 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
In search of purpose: The ABC, SBS, and the uncertain future of public service media in Australia
Public service media (PSM) in Australia operate with an unusual absence of articulated expectations, including enforceable minimum levels of Australian content. The ABC and SBS have legislated charters that codify broad purposes and protect editorial independence, yet there is no structured mechanism to review remit, performance, or resourcing. This article argues that the resulting ‘independence’ is double-edged: it limits direct ministerial dir…
Mermaids and bin chickens: Australian teenagers' engagement with screen stories in the on-demand age
Australian teenagers have grown up with abundant choices in digital screen entertainment including social media, gaming, and global streaming video services such as Netflix. This participatory audience study investigates how, why and to what extent Australian teenagers engage with drama and movies in their daily lives, including Australian stories. The research findings show that Australian teens enjoy watching long-form screen stories on their f…
Supporting children's drama in the on demand age: Assessing the efficacy of forty years of Australian policy frameworks and funding schemes
This is a case study of 40 years of policy approaches in Australian children's television during which the children's television production ecology was profoundly altered by new distribution technologies. For decades Australia used quotas, subsidies and screen organisation The Australian Children's Television Foundation to safeguard supplies of children's television including drama. Digitisation has caused enormous industrial disruption while del…
Streaming Video: Storytelling Across Borders
An international team of experts explores how streaming services are disrupting traditional storytelling. The rise of streaming has dramatically transformed how audiences consume media. Over the last decade, subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services, including Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+, have begun commissioning and financing their own original movies and TV shows, changing the way and the rate at which content is produced across the gl…
Understanding the changing television market: A comparison of the macroeconomy of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia
The business of television has been transformed by digital distribution and internationalisation. The implications of these changes vary based on a range of structural dynamics such as national scale, language and pre-existing norms tied to particular macroeconomic conditions, of which, the balance of funding is key. This article looks beyond the general sense of crisis tied to digital disruption to investigate the macroeconomic conditions that s…
Effective cultural policy in the 21 st century: Challenges and strategies from Australian television
This article uses Australia to illustrate the need for more ambitious cultural policy measures in response to industrial reconfiguration wrought by digital distribution and other industry change. In many countries, cultural policy is challenged by industrial shifts that have further escalated the internationalisation of the television industry in ways that directly challenge policy mechanisms designed to ensure the achievement of cultural objecti…
The first stage of Australia's digital transition and its implications for Australian television drama
This article analyses how digitisation and screen policy reform altered the production of domestic drama and children's programmes in Australia. Focusing on dynamics that developed before widespread use of streaming services, it maps the disruptions and evolution that digital 'multi-channels' caused and how they challenged audiovisual policy frameworks intended to safeguard local television including drama on advertiser-funded broadcasters. The a…
Children and the media industries
New platforms and services for children’s television and video have seen children in many countries abandon linear television for online viewing. These services challenge existing definitions of children’s television along with ways of understanding the production and distribution of children’s screen content. Children are a valuable audience for global streaming services, including YouTube, Netflix, and Disney+. All operate however outside local…
Re-Visiting Tom O'Regan's Australian Television Culture: Why Media Ownership, Regulation and Policy Still Matter
Almost 30 years after its publication, Tom O'Regan's innovative and ambitious, multi-layered analysis of Australian television culture remains an important text for contemporary scholars of television studies, cultural and communications studies, and media industries. In this article, I re-visit the multiple lessons of value that we can take from Australian Television Culture and its distinctive analytical frameworks. Two of the book's key areas …
Producing Children’s Television in the On Demand Age
Drawing on extended interviews with leading industry figures including successful children's content producers, this book provides a detailed insider account of the transforming creative circumstances of contemporary children's screen content. Streaming television services like Netflix and YouTube have increased in popularity while public service broadcasters like the BBC are investing heavily in children's content in an effort to stay relevant t…
Globalising the local in children’s television for the post-network era: How Disney+ and BBC Studios helped Bluey the Australian cattle dog jump the national fence
Online television services are changing the way television is funded, produced and experienced by its national and global audiences, with profound cultural implications. The case study presented here of Australian production company Ludo Studio and the animated series Bluey provides valuable insights into the increasingly complex interactions between the local and the global in television production, and the cultural counterflows they can engende…
Managing productive academia/industry relations: The interview as research method
This article addresses key questions around the use of the semi-structured interview as both a research method and a means of managing productive academia/industry relations. It argues that the establishment of trust is crucial to the effective use of interviews as a data gathering strategy for production studies research, and to the building of a sustained research dialogue with practitioners. It offers some strategies for trust building, and hi…
Pukeko Pictures and the Kiwi DIY Spirit: Building Global Partnerships from the End of the World
Wellington, New Zealand is a major international screen production base for movies including Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies. New Zealand production companies like Jackson’s Weta Group producing content for international markets benefit from local policy settings that support such productions. In 2008, a group of long-time Jackson collaborators including Richard Taylor established Pukeko Pictures. In a small country wit…
Regulating contemporary children's television: How Digitisation Is Re-Shaping Compliance Norms and Production Practices
Since its inception, the relationship between television and the child audience has been the subject of public concern and regulatory attention. Little is known, however, about the recent impact of digitisation on the unfashionable but influential practice of television compliance, that is, the industry's application of state regulations and broadcasters' own editorial standards to children's programmes. Drawing on extended interviews with broadc…
Reality's children: Young People and Factual Entertainment Television
This article addresses a deficit in television scholarship through its focus on children's engagements with contemporary factual entertainment television. The article seeks to indicate the contemporary diversity of children's engagements with factual television, to examine public service broadcasters' increasing use of children's performative labour in non-drama productions and to point the way for further research. The article begins with a surv…
Children's television in transition: Policies, Platforms and Production
While the internet has facilitated a proliferation in children's media offerings and platforms, television remains the dominant medium in children's lives. Broadcasters and subscription services both compete for their attention, as viewers and as potential consumers of merchandise. Within this transforming landscape, children's television is now produced and distributed through complex processes for global and local markets. The arrival of SVOD s…
Cultivating global celebrity: Bindi Irwin, FremantleMedia and the commodification of grief
Bindi Irwin, daughter of the late Steve Irwin, the Australian conservationist and star of The Crocodile Hunter series, has been celebretised since birth. Now age 17, Irwin’s winning performance in the 2015 US Dancing With the Stars extended her public profile from children’s TV into a prime-time talent show with a global reach. This article considers the role played by mega-indie production company FremantleMedia in the globalisation of Irwin’s c…
Creativity, Culture and Commerce: Producing Australian Children’s Television with Public Value
Since the late 1970s, Australia has nurtured a creative and resilient children's television production sector with a global reputation for excellence. Creativity, Culture and Commerce explores the creative, economic, regulatory and technological factors shaping the production of contemporary Australian children's television for digital regimes. Charting the complex new settlements in children's television that developed from 2001-2014, the book i…
You've Been Pranked: Reality Tv, National Identity and the Privileged Status of Australian Children's Drama
Australian children have always been considered a special television audience. In November 2009, Australia's public service broadcaster the ABC launched Australia's first dedicated free-to-air children's channel. Within a year of its launch, ABC3's most popular program was a local version of the transnational reality format, Prank Patrol. The popularity of reality television with children challenges policy settings, including the Children's Telev…
Globalisation from within? The De-Nationalising of Australian Film and Television Production
Saskia Sassen argues that globalisation is taking place deep inside countries and 'institutional domains that have largely been constructed in national terms'. This type of globalisation is localised to 'national' and 'subnational' settings, but is reorienting them towards global agendas and systems. The result is an unremarked de-nationalising of national policy domains, processes, activities and instruments. In this article, we argue that these…
A very special audience: How layering and drift in Australian cultural policy have affected the production of children’s television drama for digital markets
Layering and drift have occurred in Australian cultural policy surrounding the production of film and television. Children have always been considered a special audience by Australian regulators, deserving of locally made content created especially for them. The production of Australian children’s television has enjoyed unusual levels of regulatory support since the late 1970s, much of which is expressed through the policy mechanism of The Childr…
It’s a small world after all: New media constellations and Disney’s rising star – the global success of High School Musical
The pan-platform distribution of children’s television has exacerbated the traditional ‘obligation or asset?’ dichotomy that has characterized the child audience in America, Australia and the UK. Current industrial constellations mean that a media conglomerate like the Disney Corporation can take advantage of a propitious ‘alignment of the planets’ of production, distribution and regulation to monetize programs through multiple windows. Disney ca…
H2o: Just Add Branding: Producing High-Quality Children's TV Drama for Multi-Channel Environments
This is a case study of the Australian company Jonathan M. Shiff Productions and its 'tween' program, action series H2O: Just Add Water. The program has sold in 150 countries including the United States, where it was 'the first non-American live action to be bought by Nickelodeon in America' and screens every Sunday night as family entertainment. It is also the highest rating children's drama series on Nickelodeon UK. While Australia's content re…
Junk Food or Junk TV: How will the Uk Ban on Junk Food Advertising Affect Children's Programs
The implementation of a partial junk food television advertising ban in the United Kingdom is adding to the woes of commercial broadcasters already under pressure in a fiercely competitive multi-channel environment. The UK free-to-air channel ITV1 recently announced the closure of its children's programs production unit and children's television production in the United Kingdom has been described as being 'in meltdown'. The United Kingdom represe…
Effective cultural policy in the 21 st century: Challenges and strategies from Australian television
This article uses Australia to illustrate the need for more ambitious cultural policy measures in response to industrial reconfiguration wrought by digital distribution and other industry change. In many countries, cultural policy is challenged by industrial shifts that have further escalated the internationalisation of the television industry in ways that directly challenge policy mechanisms designed to ensure the achievement of cultural objecti…
Globalisation from within? The De-Nationalising of Australian Film and Television Production
Saskia Sassen argues that globalisation is taking place deep inside countries and 'institutional domains that have largely been constructed in national terms'. This type of globalisation is localised to 'national' and 'subnational' settings, but is reorienting them towards global agendas and systems. The result is an unremarked de-nationalising of national policy domains, processes, activities and instruments. In this article, we argue that these…
H2o: Just Add Branding: Producing High-Quality Children's TV Drama for Multi-Channel Environments
This is a case study of the Australian company Jonathan M. Shiff Productions and its 'tween' program, action series H2O: Just Add Water. The program has sold in 150 countries including the United States, where it was 'the first non-American live action to be bought by Nickelodeon in America' and screens every Sunday night as family entertainment. It is also the highest rating children's drama series on Nickelodeon UK. While Australia's content re…
Regulating contemporary children's television: How Digitisation Is Re-Shaping Compliance Norms and Production Practices
Since its inception, the relationship between television and the child audience has been the subject of public concern and regulatory attention. Little is known, however, about the recent impact of digitisation on the unfashionable but influential practice of television compliance, that is, the industry's application of state regulations and broadcasters' own editorial standards to children's programmes. Drawing on extended interviews with broadc…
The first stage of Australia's digital transition and its implications for Australian television drama
This article analyses how digitisation and screen policy reform altered the production of domestic drama and children's programmes in Australia. Focusing on dynamics that developed before widespread use of streaming services, it maps the disruptions and evolution that digital 'multi-channels' caused and how they challenged audiovisual policy frameworks intended to safeguard local television including drama on advertiser-funded broadcasters. The a…
Globalising the local in children’s television for the post-network era: How Disney+ and BBC Studios helped Bluey the Australian cattle dog jump the national fence
Online television services are changing the way television is funded, produced and experienced by its national and global audiences, with profound cultural implications. The case study presented here of Australian production company Ludo Studio and the animated series Bluey provides valuable insights into the increasingly complex interactions between the local and the global in television production, and the cultural counterflows they can engende…
You've Been Pranked: Reality Tv, National Identity and the Privileged Status of Australian Children's Drama
Australian children have always been considered a special television audience. In November 2009, Australia's public service broadcaster the ABC launched Australia's first dedicated free-to-air children's channel. Within a year of its launch, ABC3's most popular program was a local version of the transnational reality format, Prank Patrol. The popularity of reality television with children challenges policy settings, including the Children's Telev…
Mermaids and bin chickens: Australian teenagers' engagement with screen stories in the on-demand age
Australian teenagers have grown up with abundant choices in digital screen entertainment including social media, gaming, and global streaming video services such as Netflix. This participatory audience study investigates how, why and to what extent Australian teenagers engage with drama and movies in their daily lives, including Australian stories. The research findings show that Australian teens enjoy watching long-form screen stories on their f…
Reality's children: Young People and Factual Entertainment Television
This article addresses a deficit in television scholarship through its focus on children's engagements with contemporary factual entertainment television. The article seeks to indicate the contemporary diversity of children's engagements with factual television, to examine public service broadcasters' increasing use of children's performative labour in non-drama productions and to point the way for further research. The article begins with a surv…
Cultivating global celebrity: Bindi Irwin, FremantleMedia and the commodification of grief
Bindi Irwin, daughter of the late Steve Irwin, the Australian conservationist and star of The Crocodile Hunter series, has been celebretised since birth. Now age 17, Irwin’s winning performance in the 2015 US Dancing With the Stars extended her public profile from children’s TV into a prime-time talent show with a global reach. This article considers the role played by mega-indie production company FremantleMedia in the globalisation of Irwin’s c…
Re-Visiting Tom O'Regan's Australian Television Culture: Why Media Ownership, Regulation and Policy Still Matter
Almost 30 years after its publication, Tom O'Regan's innovative and ambitious, multi-layered analysis of Australian television culture remains an important text for contemporary scholars of television studies, cultural and communications studies, and media industries. In this article, I re-visit the multiple lessons of value that we can take from Australian Television Culture and its distinctive analytical frameworks. Two of the book's key areas …
Pukeko Pictures and the Kiwi DIY Spirit: Building Global Partnerships from the End of the World
Wellington, New Zealand is a major international screen production base for movies including Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies. New Zealand production companies like Jackson’s Weta Group producing content for international markets benefit from local policy settings that support such productions. In 2008, a group of long-time Jackson collaborators including Richard Taylor established Pukeko Pictures. In a small country wit…
Children's television in transition: Policies, Platforms and Production
While the internet has facilitated a proliferation in children's media offerings and platforms, television remains the dominant medium in children's lives. Broadcasters and subscription services both compete for their attention, as viewers and as potential consumers of merchandise. Within this transforming landscape, children's television is now produced and distributed through complex processes for global and local markets. The arrival of SVOD s…
Junk Food or Junk TV: How will the Uk Ban on Junk Food Advertising Affect Children's Programs
The implementation of a partial junk food television advertising ban in the United Kingdom is adding to the woes of commercial broadcasters already under pressure in a fiercely competitive multi-channel environment. The UK free-to-air channel ITV1 recently announced the closure of its children's programs production unit and children's television production in the United Kingdom has been described as being 'in meltdown'. The United Kingdom represe…
H2o: Just Add Branding: Producing High-Quality Children's TV Drama for Multi-Channel Environments
This is a case study of the Australian company Jonathan M. Shiff Productions and its 'tween' program, action series H2O: Just Add Water. The program has sold in 150 countries including the United States, where it was 'the first non-American live action to be bought by Nickelodeon in America' and screens every Sunday night as family entertainment. It is also the highest rating children's drama series on Nickelodeon UK. While Australia's content re…
It’s a small world after all: New media constellations and Disney’s rising star – the global success of High School Musical
The pan-platform distribution of children’s television has exacerbated the traditional ‘obligation or asset?’ dichotomy that has characterized the child audience in America, Australia and the UK. Current industrial constellations mean that a media conglomerate like the Disney Corporation can take advantage of a propitious ‘alignment of the planets’ of production, distribution and regulation to monetize programs through multiple windows. Disney ca…
A very special audience: How layering and drift in Australian cultural policy have affected the production of children’s television drama for digital markets
Layering and drift have occurred in Australian cultural policy surrounding the production of film and television. Children have always been considered a special audience by Australian regulators, deserving of locally made content created especially for them. The production of Australian children’s television has enjoyed unusual levels of regulatory support since the late 1970s, much of which is expressed through the policy mechanism of The Childr…
You've Been Pranked: Reality Tv, National Identity and the Privileged Status of Australian Children's Drama
Australian children have always been considered a special television audience. In November 2009, Australia's public service broadcaster the ABC launched Australia's first dedicated free-to-air children's channel. Within a year of its launch, ABC3's most popular program was a local version of the transnational reality format, Prank Patrol. The popularity of reality television with children challenges policy settings, including the Children's Telev…
Globalisation from within? The De-Nationalising of Australian Film and Television Production
Saskia Sassen argues that globalisation is taking place deep inside countries and 'institutional domains that have largely been constructed in national terms'. This type of globalisation is localised to 'national' and 'subnational' settings, but is reorienting them towards global agendas and systems. The result is an unremarked de-nationalising of national policy domains, processes, activities and instruments. In this article, we argue that these…
Creativity, Culture and Commerce: Producing Australian Children’s Television with Public Value
Since the late 1970s, Australia has nurtured a creative and resilient children's television production sector with a global reputation for excellence. Creativity, Culture and Commerce explores the creative, economic, regulatory and technological factors shaping the production of contemporary Australian children's television for digital regimes. Charting the complex new settlements in children's television that developed from 2001-2014, the book i…
Regulating contemporary children's television: How Digitisation Is Re-Shaping Compliance Norms and Production Practices
Since its inception, the relationship between television and the child audience has been the subject of public concern and regulatory attention. Little is known, however, about the recent impact of digitisation on the unfashionable but influential practice of television compliance, that is, the industry's application of state regulations and broadcasters' own editorial standards to children's programmes. Drawing on extended interviews with broadc…
Reality's children: Young People and Factual Entertainment Television
This article addresses a deficit in television scholarship through its focus on children's engagements with contemporary factual entertainment television. The article seeks to indicate the contemporary diversity of children's engagements with factual television, to examine public service broadcasters' increasing use of children's performative labour in non-drama productions and to point the way for further research. The article begins with a surv…
Children's television in transition: Policies, Platforms and Production
While the internet has facilitated a proliferation in children's media offerings and platforms, television remains the dominant medium in children's lives. Broadcasters and subscription services both compete for their attention, as viewers and as potential consumers of merchandise. Within this transforming landscape, children's television is now produced and distributed through complex processes for global and local markets. The arrival of SVOD s…
Cultivating global celebrity: Bindi Irwin, FremantleMedia and the commodification of grief
Bindi Irwin, daughter of the late Steve Irwin, the Australian conservationist and star of The Crocodile Hunter series, has been celebretised since birth. Now age 17, Irwin’s winning performance in the 2015 US Dancing With the Stars extended her public profile from children’s TV into a prime-time talent show with a global reach. This article considers the role played by mega-indie production company FremantleMedia in the globalisation of Irwin’s c…
Managing productive academia/industry relations: The interview as research method
This article addresses key questions around the use of the semi-structured interview as both a research method and a means of managing productive academia/industry relations. It argues that the establishment of trust is crucial to the effective use of interviews as a data gathering strategy for production studies research, and to the building of a sustained research dialogue with practitioners. It offers some strategies for trust building, and hi…
Pukeko Pictures and the Kiwi DIY Spirit: Building Global Partnerships from the End of the World
Wellington, New Zealand is a major international screen production base for movies including Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies. New Zealand production companies like Jackson’s Weta Group producing content for international markets benefit from local policy settings that support such productions. In 2008, a group of long-time Jackson collaborators including Richard Taylor established Pukeko Pictures. In a small country wit…
Producing Children’s Television in the On Demand Age
Drawing on extended interviews with leading industry figures including successful children's content producers, this book provides a detailed insider account of the transforming creative circumstances of contemporary children's screen content. Streaming television services like Netflix and YouTube have increased in popularity while public service broadcasters like the BBC are investing heavily in children's content in an effort to stay relevant t…
Globalising the local in children’s television for the post-network era: How Disney+ and BBC Studios helped Bluey the Australian cattle dog jump the national fence
Online television services are changing the way television is funded, produced and experienced by its national and global audiences, with profound cultural implications. The case study presented here of Australian production company Ludo Studio and the animated series Bluey provides valuable insights into the increasingly complex interactions between the local and the global in television production, and the cultural counterflows they can engende…
Children and the media industries
New platforms and services for children’s television and video have seen children in many countries abandon linear television for online viewing. These services challenge existing definitions of children’s television along with ways of understanding the production and distribution of children’s screen content. Children are a valuable audience for global streaming services, including YouTube, Netflix, and Disney+. All operate however outside local…
Re-Visiting Tom O'Regan's Australian Television Culture: Why Media Ownership, Regulation and Policy Still Matter
Almost 30 years after its publication, Tom O'Regan's innovative and ambitious, multi-layered analysis of Australian television culture remains an important text for contemporary scholars of television studies, cultural and communications studies, and media industries. In this article, I re-visit the multiple lessons of value that we can take from Australian Television Culture and its distinctive analytical frameworks. Two of the book's key areas …
Understanding the changing television market: A comparison of the macroeconomy of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia
The business of television has been transformed by digital distribution and internationalisation. The implications of these changes vary based on a range of structural dynamics such as national scale, language and pre-existing norms tied to particular macroeconomic conditions, of which, the balance of funding is key. This article looks beyond the general sense of crisis tied to digital disruption to investigate the macroeconomic conditions that s…
Effective cultural policy in the 21 st century: Challenges and strategies from Australian television
This article uses Australia to illustrate the need for more ambitious cultural policy measures in response to industrial reconfiguration wrought by digital distribution and other industry change. In many countries, cultural policy is challenged by industrial shifts that have further escalated the internationalisation of the television industry in ways that directly challenge policy mechanisms designed to ensure the achievement of cultural objecti…
The first stage of Australia's digital transition and its implications for Australian television drama
This article analyses how digitisation and screen policy reform altered the production of domestic drama and children's programmes in Australia. Focusing on dynamics that developed before widespread use of streaming services, it maps the disruptions and evolution that digital 'multi-channels' caused and how they challenged audiovisual policy frameworks intended to safeguard local television including drama on advertiser-funded broadcasters. The a…
Streaming Video: Storytelling Across Borders
An international team of experts explores how streaming services are disrupting traditional storytelling. The rise of streaming has dramatically transformed how audiences consume media. Over the last decade, subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services, including Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+, have begun commissioning and financing their own original movies and TV shows, changing the way and the rate at which content is produced across the gl…
Mermaids and bin chickens: Australian teenagers' engagement with screen stories in the on-demand age
Australian teenagers have grown up with abundant choices in digital screen entertainment including social media, gaming, and global streaming video services such as Netflix. This participatory audience study investigates how, why and to what extent Australian teenagers engage with drama and movies in their daily lives, including Australian stories. The research findings show that Australian teens enjoy watching long-form screen stories on their f…
Supporting children's drama in the on demand age: Assessing the efficacy of forty years of Australian policy frameworks and funding schemes
This is a case study of 40 years of policy approaches in Australian children's television during which the children's television production ecology was profoundly altered by new distribution technologies. For decades Australia used quotas, subsidies and screen organisation The Australian Children's Television Foundation to safeguard supplies of children's television including drama. Digitisation has caused enormous industrial disruption while del…
In search of purpose: The ABC, SBS, and the uncertain future of public service media in Australia
Public service media (PSM) in Australia operate with an unusual absence of articulated expectations, including enforceable minimum levels of Australian content. The ABC and SBS have legislated charters that codify broad purposes and protect editorial independence, yet there is no structured mechanism to review remit, performance, or resourcing. This article argues that the resulting ‘independence’ is double-edged: it limits direct ministerial dir…
Business (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Advertising (15 works) · Economics (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Media Studies and Communication (10 works) · Art (8 works) · Drama (8 works)