Forget Blu-ray and HD DVD, why is digital TV such a disaster?

Adam Turner
Wednesday, 14 February 2007 21:06

Opinion and Analysis

Digital television has finally made its way into a quarter of Australia's lounge rooms, but why has it taken more than six years?

Digital Broadcasting Australia says digital tuners - either in set top boxes, PVRs or built into televisions - can now be found in around 2 million Australian homes. Considering there's around 7.8 million homes in the country, that means more than one in four lounge rooms have gone digital. Of these, around three quarters are high definition (that's tuners, they might not all have a HDTV to watch it on).

This sounds like a milestone worth celebrating, until you stop to think how long it's taken to get here. Digital terrestrial television officially commenced in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth on January 1, 2001. High definition broadcasting wasn't required until August 2003 and even then only Nine and Ten broadcast in 1080i - true high definition. The ABC recently upgraded to 720p but Seven and SBS broadcast so-called high definition in 576p. You can't even call that high definition in other countries.

A key problem early on was that the government insisted on broadcasting high definition in the DVB-T format, making Australia unique in the world. This meant set top boxes had to be made specifically for Australia. Of course no-one wanted to make boxes just for the tiny Australian market, so as a result digital set top boxes were expensive and almost impossible to get in the early days.

That first summer I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Thomson digital set top box and a big arse TV for review, perfect for watching the cricket on the Nine Network in glorious widescreen. Not many people can ring their boss on a Friday and say "I can't make it to work today because the cricket's on the telly and the Windies have put Australia in to bat". Even fewer people can do it and still have a job to return to on Monday.

One of the big promises of digital television was multi-angle broadcasting and Nine was testing it out during digital television's first baby steps. Nine's three extra channels were all broadcasting different views of the game. 'Nine Action 1' continually broadcast the view from a camera embedded in the middle stump, creatively known as "stump-cam". 'Nine Action 2' revealed the view from the grandstand, with the camera following the action around the ground. 'Nine Action 3' continually showed the computer generated scorecard. All of Nine's 'Action' channels had the audio from the main channel.

New, different, exciting. So far so good - so what went wrong? CONTINUED