12 - One Goal, Many Paths

Summary

In the two preceding parts of the book we discussed the introduction and evolutionary path of digital TV in the United States and the United Kingdom. We observed how in response to common challenges related to spectrum management, industrial competitiveness, macroeconomic stability, and a new international agenda for the communications sector, governments engaged in programmatic efforts to reshape the broadcasting sector centered around the migration from analog to digital TV. In the final part of the book, I seek to explicate the remarkable differences in the transition strategies implemented in both countries, and reflect on what they tell us about government regulation of broadcasting at times when the capacity and the appropriateness of state control over the industry are under challenge.

The first step to accomplish this task is to identify the main patterns of the transition strategy adopted in each nation (Table 12.1). These patterns permeate the choices made about how to promote digital TV and tackle the coordination problems and regulatory issues that emerged throughout the migration process. Transition policies combined traditional concerns in media regulation with the new fiscal and industrial challenges that industrialized nations confronted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They thus bear a triple imprint: first, the imprint of international forces that raised the stakes associated with the development and implementation of new broadcasting technologies (discussed in Chapter 2); second, the imprint of domestic institutions that mediated these forces and defined the constraints and capabilities for policy response at the national level; and, third, the imprint of the organization and normative models peculiar to the broadcasting sector of each nation.