Page 183 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

Capital, Technology and the US in an 'Open Market' 173

Corp. has positioned itself as a core agent in digital information
highway constructions involving the development of mass and special-
ized consumer markets on a global scale. 41
Through compression, digital technologies will continue to reduce
the bandwidth required for the transmission of video and other sig-
nals. Digitalization also will lower production costs through the use of
computer-based production equipment. Over the next twenty years or
so, digital technology will give television the potential to become the
centerpiece of middle-class, day-to-day household communication and
economic activities. With this in mind, there is little doubt that in
the late 1990s DBS constitutes the ideal medium for the introduction
of digital high-definition television receivers. While most DBS
systems already have the capacity to transmit digitalized high-
definition television (HDTV) signals, most terrestrial over-the-air
and cable-based services still require costly upgrades in order to
participate. 42
In sum, digitally compressed transmissions constitute catalysts in
larger efforts to transform the very status of the television receiver.
From its established role as an entertainment and information med-
ium into the household communication centerpiece, HDTV may con-
stitute, in the words of Vincent Porter, 'the locomotive for an entire
industrial system, which not only keeps the programme makers in
business and gives politicians· a platform for their views, but ... also
keeps afloat the consumer electronics industry.' 43 A new generation of
digital receivers employing HDTV technical standards not only will
require the reconstruction of the technological infrastructures of the
film and television industries, but its qualitative superiority to ana-
logue-based receivers will potentially stimulate significant growth in
the electronic services and equipment markets.
In the 1970s, DBS became a medium of great interest to a number
of governments and corporations primarily due to its potential as a
vehicle for introducing HDTV to mass consumers. It was in this
context, and as a result of Japanese DBS-delivered HDTV experi-
ments, that the US Academy of Engineering recommended that
NASA re-establish its direct funding for research involving telesatel-
lite technologies. The digitalization of communications and its far-
44
reaching economic and general cultural-power potentials were cited
by the Bortnick Congressional study as a core reason for the US
government to promote advances in DBS. 45 Also, as the Department
of Commerce recognized five years later, European states and private
sector interests understood DBS to constitute the ideal vehicle