Whilst I feel that this is probably diverting into a debate rather than discussing the article I do think this reveals one of the fundamental flaws with this article It bases its observations which IMHO verge at the very least on Original research on how a particular country implements its digital TV system For example GeorgeFormby1 misses a great deal of context about the British situation which is relevant here such as Digital TV in the UK is strongly influenced by Freeview and its soon to be launched sister Freesat which are subscription free digital TV systems that the BBC the UK s very dominant compared to the US public broadcaster is the key stakeholder in As pointed out by Freeview boxes now retail at around 20 actually around 40 Although it may seem a lot to pensioners in the US it is small compared to the annual compulsory Television licence fee of around 130per year 260 Europe has traditionally had a much stronger regulatory framework with regards to broadcasting Where as if i understand correctly in the US cities are well served and rural areas often poorly served in some cases having to pay to have affiliates and stations from other markets relayed to them so they can actually have a TV service at all most of the traditional analogue channels in the UK and Europe in the UK BBC1 BBC2 ITV C4 and to a slighlty lesser extent Five whose availability is constrained by the amount of bandwidth that was left in Europe by the time it started in 1997 are obliged as part of their licence to be available universally i e In the UK 98 coverage of the UK landmass This means that European airwaves tend to be very crowded and together with the stronger licensing rules means that there are relatively few analogue channels UK homes get 4 or 5 channels and 6 in a small number of cities where usually community groups are given a low power licence The above therefore identifies the reason why a lot of European countries had an appetite for more channels when digital TV came along The restricted space available particularly terrestrially has meant that channels tend to be crammed into the available space and indeed some digital channels have a very poor picture quality compared to a good analogue signal But this only tells half the story implementations vary even in one country for example in the UK compare the bit rates of BBC1 digital are at about 6Mbps compared to those on Mux A which run at 2Mbps e g Five Life et al Thus the resultant picture quality is purely down to the implementation that various multiplex owners have chosen to take and is not indicative of digital TV in general Indeed as I understand in the US where homes generally have a much greater number of channels but are afflicted with the inferior NTSC system The application of digital TV has generally been to deliver HDTV as opposed to large quantities of new channels and indeed that brings the question of what it is all for In the UK and Europe large swathes of digital space are reserved for the public broadcasters without getting into a debate over whether all this space is used for programming that is truely public service post digital switch over this will allow every home in the UK to access free to air and terrestrially the way most people receive TV in the UK channels such as BBC Parliament coverage of parliament BBC News 24 likely to be the UK s only free to air rolling news channel before long BBC Four high brow arts and culture Teachers TV a channel for Teachers etc etc