Digital Terrestrial Television in Europe

Allan Brown, Robert G. Picard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135618537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Digital technology for the production, transmission, and reception of television is expected to replace analogue transmission throughout the world. The timetable for this transition is uncertain and different projections have been made for virtually every country in the world. This book gives the exhaustive details of the issues of this changeover in Europe and elsewhere. The details are placed within the context of the massive changes, which the television industry has been subjected to over the past 25 years.The rollout of digital terrestrial television (DTTV) in Europe is a significant issue for every country included in this survey. It is of such importance because DTTV is the centerpiece of many governments' policies toward making Europe the world leader in new information and communication technologies. These same governments are all wrestling with the issues of how to use the technology in ways that create both commercial and non-commercial value. European perspectives on the social, cultural, and political nature of broadcasting vary significantly from those in other parts of the world and require that the introduction of DTTV should be handled differently to its introduction elsewhere.There are enormous technical, political, and economic aspects to be considered and these vary from country to country in Europe. The two editors bring a perspective to this study as media economists who come to the European scene from other parts of the world. The book covers DTTV in depth, and it also includes discussions of cable, satellite, broadband, and Internet technology for comparison.

II
Country Case Studies

Chapter 7
United Kingdom: Never Mind the Policy, Feel the Growth

Peter Goodwin

Communication and Media Research Institute University of Westminster

The story of Digital Terrestrial Television in the UK effectively starts in August 1995 with the publication of the White Paper, Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting: The Government’s Proposals (DNH, 1995). The 1995 White Paper is of crucial importance to the story of UK DTTV in two ways. It laid down for the first time the general outlines of the regulatory framework under which DTTV in the UK was to be launched nearly three and a half years later. And it advanced a set of policy objectives which DTTV might be expected to deliver—policy objectives which, although formulated by the Conservative administration of John Major, have been enthusiastically embraced by the New Labour administrations of Tony Blair, and, as we shall discuss, persist to this day. So each of these aspects of the government’s 1995 DTTV proposals is worth looking at in some detail, both in terms of its historical context and in terms of its logic for subsequent developments.

First the regulatory framework, The 1995 White Paper anticipated that “for digital terrestrial television, it is likely that six frequency channels will be available initially, with potential coverage in the medium term ranging from 60–70 per cent to over 90 per cent of the UK population. Each frequency channel will be able to carry at least three television channels, and at times possibly many more. These will need to be ‘multiplexed’ into a single digital signal before transmission.” (DNH, 1995, p. 1). Licences for these multiplexes would be allocated by, and the multiplexes regulated by, the Independent Television Commission (ITC). In other words they would be allocated to commercial operators in a, by historical UK standards, lightly regulated but, by many international standards, still quite highly regulated context. The ITC had been established by the 1990 Broadcasting Act to license and regulate all television services in the UK other than the BBC. By 1995 the ITC had already conducted licence allocations for the old analogue terrestrial Channel 3 (ITV) and the new analogue terrestrial Channel 5 on the basis of a highly qualified cash bid system. (Goodwin, 1998, chap. 8.)

DTTV was therefore placed firmly in the more commercially-oriented and “lighter touch” regulated framework of television broadcasting established during the last years of the Thatcher administrations by the 1988 White Paper Broadcasting in the ‘90s: Competition, Quality and Choice (Home Office, 1998) and the 1990 Broadcasting Act (Goodwin, 1998, chap. 7).

In two important respects, however, in its treatment of DTTV the 1995 White Paper departed from the more extreme rigours of the Conservative Government’s recent deregulatory thrust.

First, space on the frequencies allocated to DTTV was to be given as of right to the existing analogue terrestrial channels including the BBC. The 1995 White Paper explained:

The Government believes in the merits of public service broadcasting and wishes to safeguard it into the digital age. The Government therefore believes that it is essential to give public service broadcasters the opportunity of a place in the new technology. This will enable them to offer an improved service, for example through widescreen television, and will be in the interests of digital terrestrial television as a whole, since the involvement of the existing broadcasters is likely to encourage consumers to move to digital.

So each of the following channels, BBC1, BBC2, Channel 3 (ITV), Channel 4/S4C and Channel 5 would have about a third of a multiplex reserved for it (DNH, 1995, pp, 11–12). In practice that would mean ability both to simulcast and to provide an additional channel.

Second, the ITC would not employ (even a heavily qualified) cash bid in its allocation of DTTV multiplexes. Instead the ITC would assess applications “according to three main criteria:”

1. investment in infrastructure over time in order to provide services as quickly and as widely as possible across the UK;
2. investment additional to a) to promote the early take-up of digital television, including investment to encourage take-up of receivers; and
3. the variety of programme services to be transmitted” (DNH, 1995, p. 9).

These two elements of the proposed regulatory regime for DTTV might have seemed surprising to observers of Conservative broadcasting policy at the end of the 1980s, but by the mid-1990s they were not unexpected. In 1994 John Major’s government had produced a White Paper on the BBC (DNH, 1994) which both endorsed its established domestic position and enthusiastically embraced the corporation’s new international ambitions (Goodwin, 1998, chap. 9). And the operations of the cash bid system for Channels 3 and 5 had been so creatively interpreted by the ITC and so sceptically or hostilely received by media commentators that it was hardly surprising that the Government did choose not to repeat the exercise for DTTV (Goodwin, 1998, chap. 8).

The second important aspect of the 1995 White Paper was the policy objectives it advanced for DTTV. The central elements of these are crisply summed up in the very first paragraph of the document:

Digital broadcasting could mean many more television channels and radio stations. For many people, it will provide their first experience of the full potential of the information superhighways. It will provide significant opportunities for the British manufacturing and programme production industries. In the longer term it may be possible to switch off analogue transmissions of terrestrial broadcast services, releasing significant amounts of valuable spectrum for further broadcast or other use (DNH, 1995, p. 1).

Before we examine these policy objectives further one crucial ambiguity in their formulation should be noted. This opening paragraph of the White Paper quoted above, made its claims not for digital terrestrial broadcasting in particular but for digital broadcasting (presumably) in general, including not only digital terrestrial, but also digital satellite and digital cable. The White Paper rapidly moved from these bold pronouncements about digital broadcasting in general to proposals almost exclusively about digital terrestrial. Satellite and cable were almost wholly ignored in the rest of the document with the one significant exception (to which we shall return shortly) that digital terrestrial broadcasting would “give terrestrial broadcasters the opportunity to compete with those on satellite and cable” (DNH, 1995, p. 1).

This slippage from digital broadcasting in general to digital terrestrial was to prove of crucial importance not merely because of its theoretical sloppiness but because of the particular features of the UK television market into which DTTV was to be launched.

The theoretical issue is easy to clarify. Digital broadcasting could indeed “mean more television channels” than analogue. Exactly how many more was a technical question (involving compression technology, frequency allocation, etc). But that multiplication in channels applied not simply to terrestrial television, but also to satellite and cable, each of which could (and did) already deliver, in their analogue format several times the number of channels delivered by analogue terrestrial television. Two conclusions result from this:

1. DTTV would deliver no more (and probably less) channels than were already delivered by analogue satellite and analogue cable.
2. Digital satellite and digital cable would deliver several times the number of channels delivered by DTTV, thereby enabling them to offer a qualitatively superior service in terms of channel choice and services like near-video-on-demand.

Both these points were of crucial practical importance in the UK case, because, in 1995 the UK already had an established and substantial multi-channel pay television subscriber base delivered by (most importantly) analogue satellite and (less importantly but still significantly) by analogue cable.

By 1995 multi-channel television in the UK already had a significant history. In the early 1980s the Conservative government had proposed an ambitious plan (of which more later) to bring broadband cable to the UK. But for most of the rest of the decade build had been slow, programme offer unattractive and take-up consequently very low (Goodwin, 1998, chap. 5). Things changed dramatically with the start of specifically UK-directed DTH satellite television broadcasting by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky in March 1989 and (less importantly) British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) in May 1990. The two merged (very much on Murdoch and Sky’s terms) to form British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) in November 1990. BSkyB grew steadily, and cable emerged from its earlier lethargy. By January 1995 there were estimated to be over 4 million subscribers to multi-channel pay television in the UK (more than 3 million by satellite, nearly 1 million by cable) and by January 1996 that had increased to nearly 5 million (BARB). This meant, respectively, 16 per cent and 20 per cent, of UK television households, and (because satellite and cable households were generally significantly bigger than average) somewhat larger percentages of the UK population. So, in August 1995 at the time that the White Paper was pronouncing that digital television would deliver more channels, and using this as a justification for its proposals on DTTV, probably 20 per cent of the UK population lived in households subscribing to analogue multi-channel pay television, delivered by either satellite or cable, each of which already delivered significantly more than the 18 channels which the White Paper flagged up for DTTV,

That raised a quite fundamental practical problem for any prospective DTTV service.

Simply on the basis of providing more channels, DTTV faced a huge and possibly crippling disadvantage. It would be launched into an environment in which more than 20 per cent of the population (the early and not-so-early adopters) already had multi-channel television via satellite or cable platforms which, in their even in their analogue format already offered more channels than DTTV would. So what distinguishing and attractive features would enable DTTV to find a market?

The problem was made even more serious by one other feature of the UK television market. Multi-channel pay television in the UK in 1995 was overwhelmingly dominated by BSkyB. Three quarters of subscribers received their service via satellite, almost all from BSkyB, which, over the previous six years had built up very effective systems of marketing and subscriber management. BSkyB ‘s dominance of multi-channel content in the UK extended even further. The cable companies had not managed to establish a substantially independent programming offer, What they offered to their subscribers was effectively the same programming mix that BSkyB offered its DTH satellite subscribers, in many cases wholesaled from BSkyB. BSkyB had the most popular general entertainment channel on multi-channel television, Sky One, the most popular 24-hour news channel, Sky News; it had done the deals with the Hollywood studios to feed its premium movie channels and it already owned the most important sports rights (most notably Premier League football) to support its popular premium sports channels.

This fundamental problem for the prospects of DTTV was in no way addressed by the 1995 White Paper. Nor was it seriously addressed by the Government in the period between the White Paper and the eventual launch of DTTV. But it certainly did not escape contemporary observers. To give just one example, reviewing the prospects for DTTV in the leading UK television trade weekly Broadcast at the beginning of 1997, Martin Jackson referred to the “widespread scepticism” about the prospects for DTTV and “the spectre overshadowing” it:

...a spectre whose name is Rupert Murdoch. Already dominating pay-TV through satellite broadcaster BSkyB, Murdoch has more than just a head start on his land-locked rivals in the journey beyond analogue (Broadcast, 1 January 1997).

The BSkyB spectre haunting DTTV had obvious implications for the rest of the policy objectives for digital terrestrial television advanced by the White Paper. For, of course, if DTTV failed to gain a significant new market, then its contribution to British industry, to alternative routes to the information superhighway and to analogue switch-off would all be negligible.

But, even with a more optimistic prognosis about prospects for DTTV take-up, these other policy objectives each had their own problems. ‘Opportunities for British manufacturing and programming industries’ had been a familiar mantra in previous Conservative Government plans for new broadcasting technologies—cable and satellite—in the first half of the 1980s, yet the outcome on this score for both these industries had turned out disappointing (Goodwin, 1998, pp. 52–53 and 67–68).

Providing the “first experience of the full potential of the information superhighways” was, it might seem a particularly (early) 1990s policy goal. But, to anyone with a memory of UK broadcasting policy, it also had a distinct echo of the claims advanced for cable in the UK in the early 1980...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• I: Themes and Issues
• II: Country Case Studies
• Contributors