Sydney – Australia’s free-to-air broadcasters will join forces to create an on-demand streaming video service to TV screens in an attempt to deal with serious threats to their audience base, reports The Sydney Morning Herald. The ABC’s head of TV, Kim Dalton, said the move, likely some time next year, would be the “next major chapter in free-to-air TV”. It comes as a host of emerging broadcasting rivals, such as TV set manufacturers, games console producers and digital video recorders like TiVo, start offering IPTV content services to the big screen in the living room through broadband-enabled hardware. Dalton said that the next big challenge confronting the ABC and the free-to-air television platform is to deliver a television streaming experience online and on-demand to the TV in the lounge room. He added that the ABC will do that in the next 12 to 18 months and there is every opportunity for the free-to-air platform to do that together. Dalton admitted that until recently it might have appeared unusual for the public broadcaster to promote the commercial networks, but he said the free-to-air TV industry had to work together to defend its position.