Digital TV in the Convergent Environment

he growth of digital TV in UK homes has been much more rapid than the penetration of the Internet, which has itself grown at a phenomenal rate. The digital TV services started on 1 October 1998 with satellite broadcasting followed by terrestrial broadcasting on 15 November 1998 and more recently by cable services. By mid-2000, about one-and-a-half years after the start of digital services, 5 million (or about 20 percent) UK homes had digital TV. Of these 5 million homes, 4 million had satellite services, 750,000 had terrestrial services, and the rest had cable services. This figure of 5 million homes with digital TV approaches the 25 percent of homes that now have Internet access (of course it took the Internet more than two years to grow to that level of penetration into homes). The main incentives for installing digital TV are additional programs (both those available free to viewers and those available by subscription only) delivered with high quality in wide-screen aspect ratio. However, the enhanced possibilities of interactiv-ity are likely to make the technology increasingly attractive. After all, UK audiences can be said to have had a form of interactive digital broadcast services for more than 20 years with Teletext. This provides hundreds of screen pages of news, weather, sport, games, programe guides, and so on, delivered by a digital signal transmitted by modulating the spare lines in the vertical blanking interval. Teletext is now virtually universally available in most European homes and in many countries throughout the world. People are used to access-ing the text with their TV remote control and the further steps towards interactive media offered by digital TV should come naturally to those familiar with Teletext. UK broadcasters have recognized that the Internet can be an opportunity rather than competition or a threat. Even before the start of digital TV services, they provided material available on the Internet that viewers of their analog programs would find relevant and interesting. They have given the availability of this material prominent publicity in their programming. They have also used their infrastructure (such as the support base for news and sport services) to offer an extensive set of interactive Web pages, an example of which is shown in Figure 1. Many of these Web pages have been freely available as a public service. In fact, the Web site of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is reported to have …