By Barry Fox, Contributing Editor Few would dispute that Hughes, RCA, and Thomson got it right when they launched the U.S. digital satellite pay-television service DirecTV six years ago. But today new digital terrestrial network services in the United States are creating little interest.
Receivers are expensive and sales slow.
Across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom leads Europe with digital services that are a roaring success there. The UK government minister responsible for promoting TV there, Chris Smith, is gung-ho about switching off analog. In reality, all is not quite as rosy as it looks from the statistics, however. Offering more channels of standard definition was a secondary consideration. Europe, in designing its digital TV system, took into account its own commercial high-definition TV disaster of 10 years earlier, the mainly analog HDTV system called MAC, for multiplexed analog components.