Technology, Television, and Competition
The Politics of Digital TV

Shows how nationalism and regionalism led to missed opportunities in developing the new technologies.

Jeffrey A. Hart (Author)

9780521826242, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 February 2004

264 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.56 kg

'It has a dry, academic writing style, with jargon and data that go beyond basic textbook (or newspaper-based) understanding of the core issues. One hopes that the information collected here can inform future volumes that are more accessible to non expert readers.' Megan Mullen, Department of Communication, University of Wisconsin

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the advanced industrial countries considered replacing the existing analogue television infrastructure with a new digital one. A key common feature to the debates over digital TV (DTV) in the United States, Western Europe and Japan was the eventual victory of the ideas of digitalism (the superiority of everything digital over everything analogue) and of digital convergence (the merging of computing, telecommunications and broadcasting infrastructures made possible by digitalization) in public debates over standards. Jeffrey Hart's book shows how nationalism and regionalism combined with digitalism to produce three different and incompatible DTV standards in the three regions, an outcome which has led to missed opportunities in developing the new technologies. Hart's book contributes to our understanding of relations between business and government, and of competition between the world's great economic powers.

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of acronyms
1. Introduction
2. The institutional setting for advanced TV
3. Digital convergence: consumer electronics
4. HDTV in Japan
5. HDTV in the United States
6. HDTV in Europe
7. Digital television in the United States
8. Digital television in Europe and Japan
9. Examples of global standards
10. Conclusions
Index.

Subject Areas: Television technology [TJKV], Political economy [KCP], Economics [KC], Politics & government [JP], Communication studies [GTC]