Digital TV – commercial model?

TELSTRA says the federal Government should consider subsidies or tax incentives to help people buy the decoders needed to view digital TV, while again calling for new TV licences to be issued... "No commercial model other than a commercial free-to-air broadcasting licence will be able to accommodate the transmission costs," it said. "Telstra sees the cost of transmission infrastructure as prohibitive as it is fixed regardless of the size of the audience."
- Tax break for digital TV decoders Jane Schulze, The Australian, FEBRUARY 01, 2002

Notes:

At the same time the broadcasting industry debates interactive TV, the issue of broadband access in Australia, which was relatively dormant for five years, has again become an issue. This follows the failure of Australian government policy which saw the rollout of two competing analogue pay TV networks. Many of the issues of the 1990's infobahn debate (Clarke & Worthington 1994) are again becoming prominent: what level of service is it reasonable to aim for in Australia?; who will pay for it? Telecommunication suppliers argue that consumers need some compelling content before it will be worth investing in a network to carry it, content creators argue that it is not worth creating content for a non-existent network
Consumers voted with their feet and adopted the Internet, because it provided more control. Hardware, software, networks and content came from many different sources. There were, and are, technical complexities, network failures, commercial failures, but consumers still used the Internet.
The interactive TV conundrum can be similarly sidestepped by adopting a creative and flexible approach. This approach is already evolving with set-top-box manufacturers adopting the most popular parts of proposed iTV standards.
What is now required is the multimedia equivalent of the first graphical web browsers: something which can operate on existing networks, with a relatively crude service, but with compelling content and room for expansion.
The first step is to describe the content, using metadata.