Digital interface in Indonesia’s public service broadcasting: Its initiatives and regulatory challenges

The merging of broadcast platforms, the Internet and social media has challenged the former state-owned broadcasters of Indonesia to find new content strategies and forms suited to the networked media environment. Over the past decade, the arrival of digital technology and rapid growth of social media has broken down the previous linear model of service delivery in Indonesian broadcasting. However, national policy on this issue remains lacking. At present, the Indonesian Broadcast Law (Law No. 32 of 2002) only gives the country’s public radio an ability to use the spectrum in the analogue model. Digital migration, as well as legal protection of social media services, remains an ongoing debate among policy-makers, that will allow free market competition, in particular to opportune the interface of service providers and content producers. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, observations and regulatory reviews, this article broadly investigates the introduction of digital interfaces in the new public service broadcasters of Indonesia, with particular focus on the process through which Indonesian PSBs have embraced the digital media environment to enable the flow of information and public participation between the media entities and their publics. In this article, I present both technology and regulatory perspectives by emphasizing the dynamics of the digital media modes of public service delivery, particularly those through which analogue broadcasts and social media have sought new ways to intertwine. In detail, I will examine certain interactive services applied by Radio Republik Indonesia (RRI), the flagship of Indonesian national public radio, namely RRI-Play, RRI.co.id and RRI-Net, to manage audience participation. Since 2016, these digital platforms have mediated public access to RRI content, generated data on media users, and monitored technological performance. In inspecting these platforms, I refer firstly to the normative debate of public service broadcasters as ‘deliberative public sphere’ before segueing into the three public-service functions that are important in social network media landscape: curation, moderation and monitoring. Furthermore, this article analyses problems behind the regulatory design of Indonesian public-service media within the context of digital broadcasts in the country.