LOCAL PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION
Local Identity and Spectrum Rights

A5, two chapters, 32 pages
ISBN: 1 899405 09 7
Publication date: 08/04/08
£8.50 inc p&p
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The terrestrial delivery of spectrum is always local. Combinations of 
local transmissions from relays and transmitters are configured to 
provide regional, nation and state-wide service distribution. The 
television broadcast spectrum bands remain crucially important because 
these can be received using existing TV aerials and the network of 
terrestrial television transmitters has been supported by the TV 
licence fee. In short, the network of UK transmitters is supported by 
direct public investment from viewers while spectrum can only be used 
efficiently if the actual number of viewers of each service is compared 
with all possible users. Research suggests that local television will 
be more watched than the more marginal television channels that might 
otherwise ‘occupy’ local spectrum - the 'digital dividend' released 
with digital switchover.

It's only be a matter of time before the goodwill between the 
commercial public service television companies (eg ITV and SMG) to 
support 1152 transmitters to reach 98.5% of households is threatened by 
digital competition from services delivered using just 80 transmitters 
reaching 90% of the population (unevenly distributed by region and 
nation). Yet, the television licence fee is financing the construction 
of a comprehensive public service digital TV network, and it is this 
wide reaching asset, with ample spectrum available for local use, which 
local television requires to deliver a universal public service, 
state-wide.

Following Professor Martin Cave’s report to the Treasury in 2002, 
economic opinion on spectrum use has refocused the language of 
communications regulation to depend on the feelings and attitudes of 
the participants in the discourse. Shifting spectrum regulation into 
markets will absolve Government, regulator and operators of 
responsibility for spectrum use by defining value and waste in market 
rather than technically efficient terms.

Yet regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum represents, and might 
continue to represent, a democratic purpose, providing a shared 
benefit, however sub-divided, as a ‘common good’. For spectrum to 
retain this public value the devolved administrations and local 
authorities must assert spectrum’s democratic as well as economic 
purpose, securing spectrum use for each nation, region and local area 
to introduce a more reflective communications regulation through 
locally accountable spectrum use.

Dave Rushton
Director, Institute of Local Television and
Public Interest Fellow, Department of Geography & Sociology, University 
of Strathclyde