The Old New Television and the New: Digital Transitions at Home

Abstract

Over the past decade, a major policy and regulatory problem for governments in Australia and elsewhere has been the implementation of strategies to switch from analogue to digital television broadcasting systems. Despite extensive debate, the transition to digital broadcasting remains fraught. What seems to be a technical matter conceals a range of intractable social, economic and cultural policy decisions. This article explores some of the challenges of digital television through the prism of an earlier, and often overlooked, transformation of television, namely the consumer-driven uptake of what can be called the ‘new television technologies’ of the 1970s and 1980s. These earlier forms of new television help to highlight several arguments: that television was not a stable object prior to digital broadcasting; that the connections between television and broadcasting have been contingent and provisional; and that a remarkable degree of innovation, disruption and adaptation has occurred at the fringes of the broadcasting system, leading to the creation of new audiovisual economies on the boundaries of the household and the market. The article then considers some examples of the ways in which this ‘household sector’ is developing as a new policy problem.