La televisión digital terrestre en España1997-2004

Resumen

The digitalisation of cable and satellite networks -the process that most involved the payment operators- is added to that of the hertzian networks, the last one to join the process and on which the bulk of the responsibility of leading the transition lies. Towards the digital universe, reconverted into the paradigm of open digital television, Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) has been conceived as a substitution technology that inherits the legacy of the traditional analogical broadcasting system, but with a radically new approach. The digitization process of terrestrial wave emissions in which the EU countries are immersed is, in turn, involved in a convergent dynamic that engulfs the three sectors that make up the communication hypersector (the audiovisual, telecommunications and computer science); the impact that its progressive incorporation will foreseeably have given way to a stage of profound changes of which the Spanish audiovisual system, whose analogue switch-off is planned for the beginning of 2010, is no stranger. Spain was a pioneer, along with the United Kingdom and Sweden, in the incorporation of DTT, but the difficulties of terrestrial platforms to reach a minimum threshold of profitability, together with the absence of political and institutional actions led to the so-called failure of its paid version (such was the modality chosen by Spain to introduce these services) Stigmatized to a large extent by the let-down that amounted to Quiero TV, the free DTT model has not finished booting, which has led it to enter a "vicious circle" from which has not managed to leave. What has prevented it from entering into a virtuous dynamic? What changes will TDT introduce in the audiovisual landscape? Is technology itself enough to propose a change in television paradigm? Is this an authentic revolution? With the aim of responding to these and other questions, this research is started, whose object of study focuses on analyzing the trajectory of DTT in Spain during the period 1997-2004; the temporal scope is determined because the digitization of the hertzian signal begins in Spain in May 1997, when the former public entity Retevisión carried out the first DTT pilot tests, a technology that was legally endorsed at the end of that same year with the approval of Law 66/97, of December 30, on Fiscal, Administrative and Social Order Measures, in which it was mentioned for the first time until the end of 2004, just when a second stage is envisaged, which the experts have agreed on denominate "phase of relaunching the TDT", in an attempt to contribute to understand the foundations of this transformation.