CBC prez: High-def TV has no business model:
Cory Doctorow:
CBC president Robert Rabinovich has decried high-def TV as having no business model. This wouldn’t be newsworthy except that the promise of HDTV is the excuse given for the Broadcast Flag, which says that paranoid studio executives should be in charge of what features TVs are allowed to have.
The idea is that if you don’t give them their design-veto, they won’t put movies on high-def, and then the money won’t come in. But when the head of Canada’s national broadcaster announces that there’s just no way any broadcaster is going to make its money back on high-def, it makes you wonder if the Brits don’t have the right idea.
In the UK, a digital TV system called “Freeview” gives the public 30 free standard-definition TV channels, for life, over the air, for one setup payment. Instead of trying to lure people into throwing away their old sets and buying all new, Hollywood-crippled ones, the Brits just created free cable for life. Amazingly, lots of people voluntarily switched — and soon they’ll be able to shut off the old analog towers and use that spectrum for better, more internetty things.
“There’s no evidence either in Canada or the United States that we have found for advertisers willing to pay a premium for a program that’s in HD,” Mr. Rabinovich said. “So basically they’re saying if you want to shoot in HD, that’s your business, we’re not going to pay you more.”
The one setup payment comes with the TV License requirement as well, I expect. If you live and watch TV in England and it’s related states, you pay an annual fee to the privilege and in return you get Doctor Who and similarly un-airable-in-the-US shows, without commercials (at least on BBC1/2). Here we sell TV based on advertising, so we get Desperate Housewives.
The difference between the two approaches has been a lively debate topic on USENET in the past, with so-called libertarians claiming the state-owned (ie, owned by me and you) is evil and the communards of the TV license scheme suggesting that selling eyeballs and attention results in pretty crappy product. I’m sure you can’t guess where my sympathies lie.
For more on how the domestic broadcasting model came to be, look for this book.