You might as well subscribe to Wired's RSS feeds rather than read me, but I have to link to
Cory Doctorow's article on how the BBC is one of the most forward-looking media outlets in the world:
Take digital TV. Practically every country in the world needs to come up with a strategy for the "analog switch-off" -- the day when the analog TV towers go dark, leaving only digital TV behind. To get there, citizens need to get new digital receivers, or risk having their TVs stop working after the switch-off. In most countries, the switch-off will be sometime before 2010.
In Britain, the BBC led the charge with something called Freeview, a system for transmitting 30 free digital TV stations and 20 free digital radio stations to the nation's analog TV sets.
A digital receiver sits on top of the TV, attached to a set of rabbit ears, and provides as many channels as most Americans get on basic cable, for free, forever....
In the United States, the "solution" was the doomed broadcast flag. The Federal Communications Commission decided the way to get Americans to junk analog sets was to offer high-definition programming.
And this line at the end is killer:
The greatest irony here is that it takes a publicly-funded broadcaster from a cozy liberal democracy to teach America's lumbering, anti-competitive Hollywood dinosaurs what a real, competitive offering looks like.
We're looking at you, CBC...
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