Digital Television Policy: A Squandered Opportunity

Abstract

Along with the centenary of the Australian Federation, the first of January 2001 marks the introduction of digital television in Australia. The event was unremarkable and unaccompanied by the usual fanfare and public commencement celebrations that are usually part and parcel of such occasions. There was no Prime Minister on hand, for example, to throw the switch to launch Australian television into the digital age. This was not because of a lack of opportunities to show something spectacular — imagine what a superb sight the simultaneously timed fireworks heralding the new year and the Centenary of Federation would have made on a wide-screen television set with cinema-quality pictures — but because there was virtually no reception equipment to be had by anyone wanting to watch the new digital pictures. The unavailability of reception equipment was just the latest of the negative attributes associated with a policy decision that seems to have nothing going for it. Apart from incumbent television broadcasters, who stand to reap considerable advantage from it, the decision has been widely criticised as a lemon by almost everyone. Students or teachers seeking examples of poor public policy need look no further than any of the major broadcasting policy interventions over the past threequarters of a century. The digital television policy is merely the latest example of policy makers and regulators ignoring the axiom that efficient public policy interventions should endeavour to maximise social welfare. As outlined in Albon and Papandrea (1998), although the rhetoric accompanying major policy changes invariably pays lip service to the public interest, most of the decisions appear to be driven by an unholy coalition of political and media players intent on protecting or advancing their mutual interests. As a result, the Australian public has regularly been denied access to popular services that people in other countries had been enjoying for many years. Free-to-air broadcasting uses the electromagnetic spectrum as the transmission medium. Because of potential interference between services broadcast on the same or adjacent channels, only a few channels can be used in any one locality. To avoid interference between services, the current Australian channel distribution pattern provides for a maximum of only six television services (of the 55 notionally available) in any one locality. Using analog transmission technology, once set the channel allocation pattern is both very difficult and very expensive to alter as a change of channels in one area sets off a