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172 Communication, Commerce and Power
reception units, the emerging PRC 'middle class' may well turn away
from these state-controlled systems and, in effect, will become increas-
ingly discriminating consumers. In the words of Dennis Brownlee, an
executive with United States Satellite Broadcasting (USSB) - another
North American DBS broadcaster - DBS investors are banking on
the belief that 'people want . . . and will pay for programming that is
more personally meaningful . .3 8
Simon Murray, a former Managing Director of Star TV, has asked
'What can governments do anyway? If people want to put up dishes,
what can the government do to stop them?.J Senior US Commerce
9
Department official Jean Pruitt also recognizes this. According to
Pruitt, the significance of DBS directly involves its impact on re-
casting the regulatory capacities of even the most totalitarian of
nation states:
As a distributor of a good or service, the thing you most want is
local support. As soon as you've got some people using your
product or making money off your product you are almost free
[sic] .... The thing about DBS [receivers] ... is they are
ubiquitous .... No one really knows you're doing it [receiving
transmissions] until after the fact. 40
The Star TV acquisition can best be understood in terms of the
European and North American activities of News Corp. in relation to
more general digital technology developments. News Corp. subsidiary
News Datacom owns the VideoCrypt signal encryption (or 'scram-
bling') technology. Through its adoption by the dominant direct
broadcasting system in Europe - Astra - and the first high-power
North American system- DirecTV- VideoCrypt is on the verge of
becoming the de facto global DBS encryption standard. More signific-
antly, News Corp. continues to upgrade both Star TV and its
European DBS interests (most notably BSkyB) to accommodate com-
pressed digitalized signals utilizing the upgraded version of Video-
Crypt already used by DirecTV. These investments will substantially
increase the quantity and quality of Asian and European transmis-
sions and will enable News Corp. to service transnational markets
with its international publishing, television and film holdings, down-
loaded from its satellites to consumers using smaller and smaller
reception dishes. In the PRC alone, following its equipment upgrade,
News Corp. anticipates that Star TV video services will be watched by
185 million Chinese households by 2003. In sum, through DBS, News