BEING first with ground-breaking technology can be a painful and costly experience. Philips found that out after developing the first mass-market video recorders only to lose out to the Japanese. Britain has just learned the same lesson, this time with digital television. Last week, ITV Digital—Britain’s only digital TV service to broadcast from ground-based transmitters—was put in the hands of financial administrators.
Leaving aside questions about the company’s business acumen and the quality of its programmes, this raises big questions about how a nation should switch over to digital TV. Britain was the test bed for this changeover, and countries that are going slower, such as Australia and other European nations, will be eager to learn from its mistakes.
Much blame for the troubles of ITV Digital has been heaped, wrongly, on the Digital Video Broadcasting system it uses. In fact DVB, which was developed in Europe, is still the technology of choice. By spreading each channel’s signal across many, narrow carrier frequencies it can provide a robust signal to a wide range of locations. It works so well that some broadcasters in the US—which opted for a slow transition to higher-definition, computer-compatible technology—lobbied the US government to replace its single-carrier system with the European model.
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So why the criticism? First, DVB’s robustness was compromised by some dubious political decisions. For example, the government let a new analogue service, Channel 5, use frequencies that had been earmarked for digital. So digital signals have had to be squeezed between existing analogue TV broadcasts and transmitted at low power to avoid interference. The resulting erratic reception and frozen pictures are a national joke.
Equally important has been the government’s failure to sell the benefits of digital to an increasingly confused public. Digital TV can offer superb quality, wide-screen pictures and lots more channels than analogue transmission. Yet the message that came across was vague and fragmented—bits of it were delivered by three separate departments. Faced with an array of free and pay services, delivered by cable or satellite as well as terrestrial transmitters, many consumers have been too confused to choose, and have stuck with analogue.
There’s no doubt that the future will be digital, so we can thank the British experiment for highlighting a couple of very costly but blindingly simple lessons about how to make the switch. First, tell viewers loud and clear what’s in it for them. And then make damn sure that someone who understands the technology is in control.
