Finland going digital – kicking & screaming

At the end of August this year, Finland is due to stop its analog terrestrial television broadcasts and go all digital. This is presumably done to free up some bandwidth for other purposes, though I’ve yet to see a convincing business case as to what exactly it is that we’re going to have in that airspace. The digitalization is hampered by introducing old technology (e.g. no HDTV, DD5.1 or all that good stuff here) and (due to some strange modifications to the DVB standard, perhaps?) Finns are being forced to use digital tuners from some obscure manufacturers – but none of that is what I want to talk about now. The whole debate is becoming yet another television-related farce, mobile TV being the other one.

Lately, YLE (the television-license-sponsored national broadcasting company) has been making headlines due to their stance on some aspects of the signal delivery. First they said that nobody can use a “central digital tuner” (so that hospitals etc wouldn’t have to buy new tuners for each TV set – there are a lot). Then they gave an exemption to the rule for hospitals. Since then apartment buildings have also been told they can also install a central digital tuner. Now there’s a debate about whether cable companies can continue transmitting analog signals.

Even though I don’t even have a TV and thus could hardly care less about all this on a personal level, I have two fundamental problems with the debate:

First of all, could somebody please explain to me why YLE has a say in any of this in the first place?! YLE is first and foremost a content producer. The signal transmission and broadcast is handled by a different company, Digita. So why would YLE a) care and b) be allowed to care about the digital / analog transmission stuff as long as consumers have the possibility of receiving the digital signal if they so wish?

Second, again as long as consumers have the possibility to receive the digital signal if they want, I don’t understand the commotion about analog cable, analog in-building transmissions or whatever other digital/analog debates. The terrestrial broadcast frequency will be freed no matter what goes on in some cables. That was the primary driver for all of this and that goal will be reached – so what’s the problem?

And anybody who says digital TV’s primary driver is in all the great services, please show me just one such great service – because so far all Finnish digital TV “services” that I’ve seen have been underwhelming to say the least.