21 October 2005

The Transition to Digital Television

I have referred to this transition in an earlier post ... now there is an article and some news of note. This article in IEEE Spectrum is a good overview of the history and the current issues, with a slight technical bent. Then, today's New York Times has this article describing recent legislative action. The bill proposes, somewhat controversially, a US$ 3 billion subsidy program for converter boxes to be paid for by spectrum sales. This idea is similar to one proposed by Tom Hazlett, and mirrors what was done in Berlin (Germany) to support the transition there, the first region in the world to do so.

Is this a reasonable strategy? Should government be involved in this transition, or should it be left to the private sector? What would be the problems of doing the latter, and the risks of doing the former?

Technorati Tags: , ,

1 comment:

Martin Weiss said...

Here is a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report related to the transition to DTV, for those of you who may wish to dig into this topic a bit deeper.