Another year, another landmark - this one in a living room somewhere near you. Some time over the New Year break, and since the last edition of Stage Screen and Radio, the proportion of UK homes with digital TV quietly crept over the 50% mark.
Whether through cable, satellite, or Freeview, more than half of us have moved into the multi-channel age, reviving government hopes that the old analogue TV transmitters might be turned off by 2010.
All three providers of digital TV have gained new customers, but none so many as Freeview, the no-subscription digital terrestrial system which uses normal aerials and a decoder costing as little as £50.
Admittedly, BSkyB continues to win new subscribers, but analysts are beginning to warn that subscription satellite is approaching a plateau, and the Murdoch clan should start concentrating on earning more from each customer, rather than relying on a steady growth in new connections going on for ever. BSkyB subcribers are already paying more than £300 a year each, and it will be interesting to see just how deep their pockets are.
Freeview, on the other hand, became a must-have item in high street shops and superstores before Christmas, shifting as many as 80,000 boxes a week, and giving almost 2.5m homes a taste of digital TV without a monthly bill.
It wasn't always thus of course - Freeview's earlier incarnation as ITV Digital ended with one of the most spectacular business collapses ever seen in the industry. Michael Green, sacked chairman of Carlton TV and a contributor to ITV Digital's £1.2bn losses, is held up as one of the big losers. However, the real suffering has been felt by our members across the ITV network in the form of wage freezes and job cuts, which look likely to continue if the shotgun wedding between Carlton and Granada goes ahead.
If the business high-fliers who set up On Digital, as the system was first called, had bothered to listen to BECTU, they might have avoided their mistake. In the mid-90s Stage Screen and Radio itself repeatedly pointed out the two fatal flaws that killed the project: there wasn't room for a third pay-tv platform in the UK; and the original implementation of the DVB technical standard that underpinned the system was unreliable.
Reborn as a free system, re-engineered to provide fewer channels but better reliability, Freeview is, for the moment, a runaway success. As is the other must-have digital toy, the DVD player.
Over the last two years the number of homes with DVDs has quadrupled from 3m to 12m, not counting those where movies are watched on computers or game stations. The phenomenal growth of DVDs is turning the film industry upside down, with profound implications for everyone working in it.
Most Hollywood movies now earn more from DVD sales than from box office receipts - you make more profit from stamping a disc than from renting out a VHS or collecting your share of a cinema ticket. Have you noticed how quickly feature films now appear on DVD after their cinema release? It's because producers and distributors want to extract their earnings from that market before the pirates get there,,,and at the moment the illegal disc stampers seem to get there very quickly indeed. Anyone who has walked through a street market recently will know that the UK is awash with pirate DVDs, posing a real risk to BECTU members.
If pirates are allowed to divert DVD revenue streams away from their rightful owners, we'll have a film industry without income. And an industry without income is an industry without workers...so don't support the pirates.
The DVD explosion could mean bad news for members who make VHS tapes for sale and rental - most DVDs are physically stamped abroad - and hundreds of members in film laboratories are waiting anxiously for the day when shooting as well as distribution goes digital. Cinemas could feel the effect as well. Although attendance is holding up well, filmgoers may increasingly be tempted to give the big screen a miss when they know that the DVD could be out in a few months, or even weeks. Managers in the big cinema chains will need to be nimble on their feet to keep punters coming through the door.
Digital technology may be handy, great fun, and cheap, but as we may see over the next year, its arrival in so many areas of our industries won't be completely painless.
Tony Lennon
February 2004
