PLANET 55 THREATEN TO LEAVE AUSTRALIA

[singlepic id=805 w=340 h=260 float=right]The Australian animation company which has animated some of the missing episodes of Doctor Who including The Reign of Terror and The Tenth Planet has told the Australian parliament it may need to relocate to the UK due to it’s difficulties accessing broadband in the country.

The head of Planet 55 Studios, which employs approximately 55 people on the Central Coast in New South Wales, told the Senate Select Committee for the National Broadband Network (NBN) yesterday that the company needs to move around 30 gigabytes of data per day and that the company has installed fibre to it’s premises and is paying $1,600 per month for a 50Mbps down, 50Mbps up link.

Austen Atkinson, said:

We could do with eight times that but we simply cannot get it. So we installed a line at AU$1,600 a month. We would love to install multiple ones but we cannot because there is not enough bandwidth. I will use any technology that works to get this out. At the moment it is called ‘post’. That is what we are having to do. It slows down our productivity massively and costs us serious money. It would add about AU$1 million to transfer, which we could easily have spent on talent here. We could have trained more talent and spent it on animators, which I would much rather have done.

Atkinson said that the organisation was taking on more work for the BBC and was considering relocating to Cardiff in the United Kingdom.

We will leave. We will take our money and go somewhere else because we have hit a bottleneck and we cannot expand. We are already looking at Planet 55 Cardiff, in the UK.

We have hit a bottleneck — not of talent. I found a massive resource of talent and trained them all myself, but if we cannot get our work out daily and communicate with our partners in LA or our partners in Dublin or our partners in Spain or wherever they are, what are we supposed to do? It is not practical.

The fact is that it is very attractive to look at in the UK at the moment, because the economy is booming again now; it is growing in my sector tremendously. As a result of Doctor Who’s success and so forth, there is a huge culture in Cardiff.

Our big problem is that the realities of employing people here—it is really unattractive, to be honest. If it were not for the fact that I have invested so much in the talent here, we probably would have gone already. It has been very hard birthing process.

To stay, we definitely need at least three times the bandwidth right now and preferably eight times the bandwidth that we have, at an affordable rate. The fact is entrepreneurs create product when there is a supply as well as a demand

Planet 55 Studios may not have to make good on it’s threat to move it’s operations abroad, with self-professed Doctor Who fan, former Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, jokingly offering to undertake the construction work himself, asking Atkinson:

I have not been able to crack a gig as an extra on Doctor Who. Can you help? It is my final life ambition—can you help?

Atkinson responded:

I tell you what, we will look into it—but get me the bandwidth I am after.

Conroy replied:

I will personally dig it for you for that.

Thanks to ZD Net

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