Friday, December 22, 2006

Digital TV resurfaces

Just a brief note -- Baltcom together with Latvian Independent Television (LNT) has proposed a private sector solution for digital terrestrial broadcast. The companies essentially want to revive a project killed by scandal in 2003 with some hope of implementing privately-financed digital broadcast TV in Latvia sometime in the 2010s.
Meanwhile, the market for digital broadcast (as far as reaching audiences with any purchasing power) has been pre-empted by cable in the cities (Baltcom and IZZI both offer digital cable in Riga) and digital satellite outside the cable footprint (ViaSat is selling satellite dishes for LVL 1 with a subscription package).
This project creates a small hope that Latvia will not be the last country in Europe with an aging and unwatched (by the commercially interesting audience) analog TV service. It will, instead, in 2015 or whatever, be the last country to get a largely unwatched digital terrestrial broadcast system (with everyone watching satellite or global broadband TV via superfast HSDPA or a successor technology).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"with everyone watching satellite or global broadband TV via superfast HSDPA or a successor technology"
dream on, silly dreamer!

Juris Kaža said...

What's so silly? Bite offers mobile TV over HSDPA. WiMax should be able to carry IPTV. "Ordinary" high speed broadband (double digit megabit) can carry it. So it is more a coming reality rather than a dream.