DTTV in Spain has had a tortured history, and although analogue switchover (ASO) has been essentially completed the government continues to pour millions of euros into the project. DTTV was introduced by decree in late 1998, but the single applicant, Onda Digital, licensed in the following year collapsed in early 2002 after accumulating losses of about €400 million. Part of the reason for the collapse was that the channel went head-to-head with the two dominant satellite TV operators, which had responded with aggressive marketing and a purchasing spree which effectively frustrated Onda’s ability to acquire attractive content and, thereby, subscribers.
A revised DTTV plan in 2002 aimed to provide broadcasters with more bandwidth to support interactive TV services. The original ASO date of early 2008 was wildly optimistic – by then ASO covered only 1% of the population. By mid-2009 some 1,278 towns in 36 provinces (representing 5.6 million people) in Phase I of the National DTT Transition Plan were to have switched to digital transmissions, yet fewer than half of the households could receive digital TV signals by the deadline. Nevertheless, the last significant areas to reach ASO (Madrid, Barcelona and Seville) did so in March 2010, leaving only a few areas without adequate coverage due to their difficult landscape. DTTV signals now give technical coverage to about 98% of the population, while to cover the remainder which are not served by DTTV, the government has subsidised a satellite DTTV distribution platform. The government has also invested in local programmes to promote ASO: it committed €11 million for the final push in 2010, coming after €35 million invested in 2008 and €75 million in 2009. Most of the money has been to fund information campaigns.
Public funding is still coming in the wake of the re-allocation of DTT multiplexes’ frequencies. This was done to allow national private broadcasters to access a complete mux each. The financially-pressed government calculated that the digital dividend spectrum to be used (the 790-862MHz band) could raise between €12 billion and €16 billion for the national economy by early 2015. The Ministry of Industry has allocated €800 million to finance DTT retuning, to be raised from the public tenders for the spectrum which may realise between €1.5 and €2 billion.
One further area of government supervision involves decoders: all operators are required to use interoperable decoders, either through Multicrypt or a Simulcrypt agreement between them: until 2002 there was no uniform conditional access system for decoders. In line with the launch of HDTV channels, the government also passed legislation obliging electronic manufacturers to equip TV sets of over 21 inches with HDTV.
Together, these measures have pushed Spain’s conversion to DTTV ahead of many others in Europe, though the path has not been a smooth one.
