Big things were expected of TV enhancement technology such as digital broadcastingbut the medium's take-up in Australia has been slow. Angus Kidman examines why.

Published in The Bulletin, July 23 2002

When the second series of Big Brother began on Channel Ten recently, more than two million Australians tuned in. A day later, a similarly large group (1.67 million) switched on to Channel Nine's coverage of the Queen Mother's funeral. As writer and academic Camille Paglia once observed: "The madness of TV is the madness of human life."

Our enthusiasm for the madness of television seems almost boundless but our enthusiasm to enhance or change the TV experience is somewhat less marked. While it's theoretically possible to receive dozens of TV channels through a combination of cable, satellite and digital services, and that number is set to rise as pay-TV services convert from analog to digital, it seems most of us aren't worried about getting anything other than the two government and three commercial networks.

In the year following the introduction of digital TV in Australia, just 12,500 set-top boxes (needed to receive digital broadcasts) were sold. Pay TV has performed better than that but not spectacularly. Foxtel, owned by Telstra, News Corp and PBL (which also owns ACP, publishers of The Bulletin), has an estimated 760,000 subscribers, while competitor Optus Vision has 200,000 and regional operator Austar has 430,000. Only one in five Australian homes has a pay-TV service. The recent announcement that Foxtel and Optus would begin cross-selling their channels underlines the commercial challenges faced in the pay-TV market.

The Australian take-up of pay TV has been dictated by peculiarly local market conditions, such as restrictions imposed by councils on the rollout of cables. The requirement that all digital broadcasts should be high-definition is also unusual, although changes to that policy have been rumoured recently. However, Australia isn't alone in seeing a slow uptake of digital services, which can provide higher-quality images, interactive electronic program guides (EPGs), and the ability to view two channels simultaneously or choose between different camera angles.

In the United States, the world's biggest TV market, take-up has stalled because of fears that digital broadcasts might be intercepted easily by pirates and concerns over the cost of converting, despite a ruling that conversion to digital must take place by 2006. "The only country in the world making a proper go of digital TV is Britain," Communications Minister Richard Alston commented last year.

Despite its widely acknowledged market-leading status, the British market has not found it easy going either. In recent weeks, the digital service launched by dominant commercial broadcaster ITV has been placed into administration after acknowledging it could not afford to pay £178.5m ($479m) for football broadcasting rights. Nonetheless, more than a third of British households are estimated to have access to digital services.

What are they getting as a result? Many visions of the future of TV are built around the idea that the TV set will be used not only for watching programs but for other services, such as internet access and home shopping. "Interactive services, although at present basic, will develop rapidly and will transform the way TV is used," says Daniel Stevenson, from internet research company Jupiter MMXI.

This notion is appealing on the surface because of the high penetration of television into all levels of society. But observers warn that attempts to convert the TV into an all-singing, all-dancing access point for a variety of services may be doomed to failure.

"When people sit down to watch TV, they want to watch TV," says David Whittaker, business development manager for pay-TV technology developer NDS. "That's the primary experience they're interested in, not shopping or reading email or whatever." Even when viewing a program guide on-screen, viewers want to continue seeing and hearing the program they're already watching, he says.

A more natural approach is to add to and enhance the existing content. The most commonly cited example is the ability to switch between different cameras at sporting events (a piece of technical trickery currently achieved by broadcasting each camera on a separate channel). Digital channels can also be used to provide extended versions of mainstream network programming, or behind-the-scenes documentaries. In a more interactive mode, British viewers of quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? can play along in real-time when the quiz is broadcast, and the best-performing ­viewers are eligible for prizes.

Attempts to extend the usage of tele­visions for other services have met with mixed results. The most prominent has been MSN TV (formerly Web TV), a Microsoft-owned initiative that allows web access via a set-top box attached to a standard TV. Despite heavy promotion, MSN TV has attracted just 1 million subscribers in the US, or less than 1% of the total number of internet users in that country. As well, MSN TV customers have complained that the wobbly approach to web standards used in some versions of the MSN TV product has made many sites inaccessible.

A widely discussed alternative scenario is for PCs to gradually take over from TV sets. However, the relatively slow adoption of broadband technologies -- essential for PCs to produce anything even remotely resembling an analog television broadcast -- suggests this scenario is even further away.

In Australia, initial enthusiasm for the notion that excess digital TV spectrum might be used for internet-like applications or full-scale rival TV networks was quickly curbed by the introduction of the "datacasting" regime, which essentially required that datacasting services could not duplicate content found on existing free-to-air networks. That provision was designed to placate the existing channels for the high costs of converting to digital broadcasts, a process that must be ­completed within five years.

As a result of the rules, most bidders for datacasting spectrum -- including Fairfax and Telstra -- withdrew from a planned auction last year. A review of the proposed datacasting rules began in December but the government has said it is committed to maintaining the monopoly of current free-to-air networks until 2007.

Internet-style access via TV may be some way off but other innovations could change our approach to the box. One concept that is still largely TV-centric is that of personal video recording, or PVR. A PVR system effectively acts like an intelligent video recorder but stores the programs on a hard drive.

This enables users to effectively "pause" a program in the middle of broadcasting, and then resume viewing afterwards. It also makes programming recordings a simple task; you simply select the program you want from the on-screen program guide. If a show runs over time, you don't need to worry about the tape running out, and artificial intelligence systems can even monitor which shows you watch regularly and record them if you're not at home when they're broadcast.

In the US, companies such as Tivo, ReplayTV and the Microsoft-backed UltimateTV have all introduced PVR products, while Sky Digital offers the service to British customers. There has also been speculation that Microsoft will add PVR capabilities to its recently launched Xbox games console.

PVR has its disadvantages. It isn't possible to lend programs as easily to a friend as you can with a VHS tape, and making permanent archive copies requires a second recording process (from the drive to another storage medium). In Australia, TV networks also have shown a remarkable reluctance to share their scheduling information, which is essential if PVR is to work fully. (It's not unheard of for commercial stations to "stretch" popular programs so that viewers can't switch channels at the end of a half-hour slot without missing the beginning of a rival program; a PVR system would have to be made aware of such strategies.)

Despite these struggles, long-term predictions for digital TV's future remain bullish. Jupiter MMXI has predicted that by 2006, more Europeans will be watching digital TV than using the internet and that by 2007, 91% of all households using digital TV will make use of services such as PVR.