Introduction

AUSTRALIA'S free-to-air television networks have agreed to use a new interactive standard, but they are far from unified about how to go about introducing it. The Nine Network has criticized the slow advancement of the interactive television standard, MHP, but insists it is still committed to the embryonic technology. Nine's director of digital services Kim Anderson expressed frustration with the development of MHP, or Multimedia Home Platform, yesterday, and said her network had proceeded with developments in the DVB-HTML standard in the meantime...
- Confusion over iTV standard Kate Mackenzie,The Australian, FEBRUARY 27, 2002

Notes:

The broadcasting industry is at the point with digital broadcasting the telecommunications industry was with digital communications in 1994. A successful direct translation is being made from analogue sound and video broadcasting to their digital equivalents. There is an assumption that there will be a more advanced use of the the technology, but no clear direction as to its form, there is debate over standards for interactivity and worry about how to pay for the cost of the new technology.
The debate over telecommunications in the mid to late 1990's was around the "information superhighway". The Internet emerged from academic research relatively late in the debate and displaced what the telecommunications industry had envisaged as the superhighway. Current broadcasting debate is around "Interactive Television" (iTV), which is seen as an advanced development of digital broadcasting. Just as telecommunications industry attempted to adopt standards for the infobahn, but failed, it is likely that Internet derived technology will overtake "Interactive Television".
The TV broadcasting industry is undergoing a difficult period where it attempts to adopt interactive features for existing services. There has been an attempt, with limited success, an attempt to adopt some aspects of the Internet, with standards such as MHP (Worthington 2001a).