Sport and Digital TV Multi-Channelling

There's another group of sporting fans who fear access to their preferred sport on free-to-air TV. In today's Sun Herald (no link yet), Rugby Union fans are concerned that Seven's AFL broadcasting commitments will diminish the coverage of their sport on that network. This follows the concern of AFL followers, including yours truly, who feared the prospect of the Nine Network winning the AFL rights would see the code would play second fiddle to Rugby League in NSW and Qld.

The stupid thing about all this is that a technical solution exists to allow free-to-air networks simultaneously broadcast competing sports, and it's here right now. It's called digital TV multi-channelling and can be accessed simply by connecting an inexpensive set top box signal converter to a bog standard TV.

The only thing stopping multi-channelling is government regulation, and those regulations were introduced at the behest of the industry who saw digital TV as an entry point for competition, and to protect their investment in pay TV.

Thankfully, the government didn't mandate the 'Rolls Royce' High Definition Digital TV (HDTV) standard as some of the networks wanted. This would have taken up the full 7Mhz spectrum and allowed nothing else. Instead, the authorities mandated that Standard Definition TV (SDTV) and a cut down version of HDTV be transmitted simultaneously, with a future provision to allow sporting telecasts be multi-channelled to provide different camera angles at the same event.

In the mean time, the ABC and SBS were given the go ahead to multi-channel, albeit with tight content restrictions.

If the government relaxed the multi-channelling restrictions the commercial free-to-air networks could show, for example, the Rugby Union and the AFL at the same time, and let the viewer decide what to watch.

Who knows? This may even prompt the public to actually show in interest an the digital medium. There's been precious little to spark interest in the technology up till now, as shown by the small uptake rate.