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Academy First Person
CONSTRUCTING CONTENTCITY
The much-heralded digital turn-on
is threatening to be a big turn-off. Tom Gutteridge explains why broadcasters must grasp the nettle.
It’s December 31, 2005. On BBC 3 Johnny Vaughan and Davina McCall are presenting their third consecutive End of the Year Show to an audience of around 600,000 viewers, while in the village of Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire, Mrs. Helena Williams is having her set top box delivered. The last person in the United Kingdom to receive digital television, Mrs. Williams is one of seven million people to have taken advantage of the Government’s digital television voucher scheme.
Because she lives in a rural community, she also has a broad- band cable less than half a mile from her cottage, courtesy of the private/public initiative to pipe broadband to rural communities, established in the pre-Budget of November 2001.
It was then that the Government surprised even media pundits by announcing that analogue switch-off would be brought forward to the beginning of 2006. Tony Blair had said that by then Britain would have become “the broadband capital of the world”. And that included Wootton Bassett.
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