New Television, Old Politics

When the definitive history of the 20th century is written, America’s transition to digital TV (DTV) may come to be viewed as the classic illustration of what can go wrong with a high tech industrial policy. For more than 20 years this transition has been taking place. It has already been the subject of half a dozen books and countless popular articles, let alone thousands of pages of Congressional Testimony and tens of thousands of pages of FCC comments. Hernan Galperin, an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communications, University of Southern California, brings this story into the 21st century and adds a novel comparative analysis. By comparing how the DTV transition was managed in both the United States and Great Britain, Galperin gives us many additional insights into the technological, economic and political factors driving this worldwide transition.

What may be most remarkable in this story is that the United States, famous for its free markets and rhetoric about media deregulation, chose to manage the broadcast industry’s transition to DTV via a highly regulatory regime favoring incumbent broadcasters over free markets. Britain, in contrast, gave far fewer subsidies to its incumbent broadcasters and used the transition to foster competition.

Galperin charts a complex set of factors that led to the divergence in US and British DTV policies. These include regime type (the US presidential system versus the UK parliamentary system of government), normative models guiding broadcast policy, and path dependency effects derived from the pre-existing broadcasting regimes. For example, Galperin argues that the British parliamentary regime allowed its politicians a greater measure of freedom from the political pressure of the broadcast lobby.

A striking feature of the DTV transition is policymakers’ changing justifications for it and evolving policies to speed it along. In the US, for example, it was designed in the late 1980s to fend off Japanese competition and make a major contribution to a robust US high-tech and consumer electronics industry. By the late 1990s, the primary justification had changed to speeding the return of spectrum for advanced wireless services.

The technology also evolved dramatically during the course of the transition. Originally, the transition was characterized as a transition to high definition TV. Later it was characterized as a transition from analog to more advanced digital technologies that could make much more efficient use of the spectrum, including more than six standard definition TV channels in the spectrum previously occupied by only one standard definition TV channel.

Galperin does an excellent job of charting the various arguments of the political actors involved in the DTV transition and packaging them into a coherent account of the political economy of DTV policy. Where he tends to fall short is in taking the arguments of the various actors at face value. Over the last 20 years, broadcasters and policymakers have provided a bewildering array of justifications for their actions. But Galperin does not adequately explore the extent to which those justifications may have been smokescreens for other motives. For example, he states that policymakers were generally more enthusiastic than TV broadcasters about the DTV transition. This is a reasonable conclusion based on the political actors’ descriptions of their ownmotives. But it ignores the huge economicwindfall—in the formof additional rights to use spectrum—that broadcasters hoped to achieve as a result of the DTV transition. It also ignores the massive, below-the-public-radar lobbying campaign that the broadcasting industry waged to win such rights.

In the end, explaining the DTV transition may be a lot simpler than Galperin makes it out to be. The broadcast industry happens to occupy the most valuable spectrum of the information age. It is potentially worth tens of billions of dollars—but only if, through lobbying, the broadcasters can win more flexible rights to use it. The latest generation of digital TV technology, for example, allows up to 20 TV channels to be carried on spectrum that could previously only carry one TV channel using analog technology. In the US, broadcasters won that entire digital windfall for themselves. In the UK, they were forced to share it with new competitors. US broadcasters were more successful in this effort largely because of the critical role of local TV media in Congressional politics. Few members of Congress could afford to risk alienating their local TV broadcaster on a vital pocketbook issue such as DTV. Galperin covers all this, but it tends to get lost in his encyclopedic account.

Another weakness is that the book only covers the DTV transition in the US and Britain. Since Galperin wrote the book, DTV transitions have rapidly progressed in other countries. In particular, the DTV transition in Berlin, Germany (subsequently copied in other regions in Germany) is now widely recognized as the most successful DTV transition in the world. Galperin touches on these DTV transitions in his last chapter, but he has left this type of expanded comparative analysis wide open for future research.

When Galperin began researching his book in 1998, he was worried that the DTV policy debate would be resolved before his book was published. Fortunately for him, that has turned out to be a far too optimistic assessment. The DTV transition in the United States now looks like it won’t be over until at least 2009. Even then, the policy debate over how to transition TV broadcasters into the Internet world is likely to continue for many years, perhaps decades, afterward. If the past is the prologue to the future, then Galperin’s book portrays a pretty dismal portrait of that future.

New Television, Old Politics: The Transition to DTV in the United States and Britain
Hernan Galperin
New York, Cambridge University Press 2004
328 pp., $80.00 hardcover
ISBN 0-521-82399-4