ABSTRACT
The story of Digital Terrestrial Television in the UK effectively starts in August 1995 with the publication of the White Paper, Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting: The Government’s Proposals (DNH, 1995). The 1995 White Paper is of crucial importance to the story of UK DTTV in two ways. It laid down for the first time the general outlines of the regulatory framework under which DTTV in the UK was to be launched nearly three and a half years later. And it advanced a set of policy objectives which DTTV might be expected to deliver-policy objectives which, although formulated by the Conservative administration of John Major, have been enthusiastically embraced by the New Labour administrations of Tony Blair, and, as we shall discuss, persist to this day. So each of these aspects of the government’s 1995 DTTV proposals is worth looking at in some detail, both in terms of its historical context and in terms of its logic for subsequent developments.
