By Sean Healy
While the federal government's December 21 decision on digital television was not popular with all of the media moguls, it will help ensure their long-term domination of the airwaves.
Digital transmission allows far more efficient use of the very high frequency (VHF) and ultrahigh frequency (UHF) spectrums that television stations broadcast on (the "bandwidth"). More information can be transmitted using the same frequencies so picture and sound quality can be higher, many more channels can be created and viewers can have greater control over what they watch (for example, they can watch a cricket match from different camera angles or replay highlights).
This is why media corporations have been so desperate to dominate the terms on which digital TV is introduced. As the Communications Law Centre's Jock Given described it in his book, The Death of Broadcasting, bandwidth is "the waterfront real estate of the digital age": whoever controls it will rake the money in.
In 1998, the federal government was set to hand control of the bandwidth to the free-to-air commercial TV channels, particularly to Kerry Packer's Channel Nine. It ruled that no new television licenses would be awarded until 2006 (dashing Rupert Murdoch's hopes of setting up a television station of his own).
The government also seemed to favour Packer's insistence that digital broadcasts be limited to 1080i, the most advanced form of the high definition TV (HDTV) format. 1080i can be seen only on specially designed TV sets (worth up to $8000 each) and would eat up nearly all of the extra bandwidth freed by the switch to digital.
Intense lobbying by Murdoch's News Limited, Fairfax, Telstra, Ozemail and Optus delayed a decision on the latter issue until December 1999. These companies argued that transmission should be in standard definition (SDTV), allowing more room on the spectrum for new media (that is, themselves), and that there should be few restrictions on datacasting.
On the surface, the final decision is an unwieldy compromise, giving none of the big companies all of what they wanted. Broadcasters must use both SDTV and a lower-grade version of the HDTV format, a decision which will open up the bandwidth to future new competitors and to datacasting, and mean that there will be cheaper alternatives to the HDTV sets.
But datacasters will be severely restricted as to how much video they can offer (no more than 10 minutes in every half hour), which destroys News' plan to set up a "back-door" TV channel and limits datacasting to text-based services. The commercial TV channels' broadcasting monopoly is well protected.
The intra-corporate squabbling can't hide one thing, however: the government's privatisation of the bandwidth.
Digital television could be used for expanding public and community broadcasting, which is currently excluded by the government's five-channel rule, or for offering vastly increased community access to the media (through datacasting). Such possibilities were deliberately excluded by the government's decision in favour of greater business control.