Digital Broadcasting Australia says digital tuners - either in set top boxes, PVRs or built into televisions - can now be found in around 2 million Australian homes. Considering there s around 7.8 million homes in the country, that means more than one in four lounge rooms have gone digital.
Of these, around three quarters are high definition (that s tuners, they might not all have a HDTV to watch it on). This sounds like a milestone worth celebrating, until you stop to think how long it s taken to get here. Digital terrestrial television officially commenced in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth on January 1, 2001.
High definition broadcasting wasn t required until August 2003 and even then only Nine and Ten broadcast in 1080i - true high definition. The ABC recently upgraded to 720p but Seven and SBS broadcast so-called high definition in 576p. You can t even call that high definition in other countries.
A key problem early on was that the government insisted on broadcasting high definition in the DVB-T format, making Australia unique in the world. This meant set top boxes had to be made specifically for Australia. Of course no-one wanted to make boxes just for the tiny Australian market, so as a result digital set top boxes were expensive and almost impossible to get in the early days.
That first summer I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Thomson digital set top box and a big arse TV for review, perfect for watching the cricket on the Nine Network in glorious widescreen. Not many people can ring their boss on a Friday and say I can t make it to work today because the cricket s on the telly and the Windies have put Australia in to bat . Even fewer people can do it and still have a job to return to on Monday.
One of the big promises of digital television was multi-angle broadcasting and Nine was testing it out during digital television s first baby steps. Nine s three extra channels were all broadcasting different views of the game. Nine Action 1 continually broadcast the view from a camera embedded in the middle stump, creatively known as stump-cam .
Nine Action 2 revealed the view from the grandstand, with the camera following the action around the ground. Nine Action 3 continually showed the computer generated scorecard. All of Nine s Action channels had the audio from the main channel.
New, different, exciting. So far so good - so what went wrong?
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