• 
• 
• 

It's good news, of course, but one can't be blamed for greeting the Mass Communications Organisation of Thailand's announcement of a plan to "go HD" with a shrug. Serious High Definition enthusiasts among the Thai public may be even having a cynical laugh at the project. Meanwhile, Vietnam, which has moved far ahead in its HD satellite service, must be looking at Thailand and wondering what has kept its apparently IT savvy neighbour so long.

If you ask the Thai bureaucrats, you may get a long, complicated and technical explanation. The simple answer, however, is "politics" and possibly jealousy among the Thai business groups involved. "Politics" has prevented many things from happening in Thailand over the past few years, but the most glaring evidence of how much damage political fighting can do to overall development is the way the MCOT announced with glee its plan to "experiment" sending out HD signals to Thai TV viewers.

It's better late than never. And we can only hope this means that Thailand is now ready to kick into high gear so that countless numbers of HD TVs in Thai households do not feel like a rip-off.

In fact, Thai consumers have experienced many "experiments", and many promises have fallen through. In an email response to a customer's enquiry, a major cable TV operator said it should be ready for HD service in 2551 BE. This has become a joke on HD Web boards, with some posters saying the reply might have confused AD with BE, meaning the real HD service from this particular operator might come around in approximately 540 years' time.

Why are we so far behind the likes of Vietnam? The given answer may be technical but the ultimate issue doesn't have to do with budgets or satellite access. The reasons behind the delay are anything but technical. They are legal, bureaucratic and, last but not least, political.

In fact, Thai TV operators can now go ahead to launch HD channels via satellite channels. But to be able to better provide HD services to the masses, the broadcast has to be made on a terrestrial basis using the digital format on available terrestrial frequencies. This will allow audiences to buy only a set-top box to receive the digital HD channels without having to invest in a satellite dish. They can also use HD TVs with built-in digital tuners to tune into the HD services.

However, the 2008 Broadcasting Act allows the National Telecom Commission (NTC) to act on behalf of the yet-to-be-formed National Broadcasting Telecom Commission (NBTC) to grant licences only for community radio stations, cable TV and satellite TV. Simply put, the NTC cannot revolutionise broadcasts by adopting the digital and HD technologies and must wait for the NBTC to be set up.

The bill to set up the NBTC is now awaiting its first reading by the Senate. As we all know, the plans to set up the NTC and the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) got caught in a political quagmire for a long time in the early 2000s, not least because the two bodies were part of a "liberalisation" scheme that would directly affect businesses belonging to the powers-that-be of the time. The later idea to combine the two bodies into the NBTC ran into new obstacles, and now the future depends on how fast the Senate moves.

Damage from the delay is far beyond mere consumers' frustration. Adopting the digital broadcast would free more resources of frequencies and thus encourage more competition and development of other technologies and services. For example, the freed-up frequencies could also be used to provide and enhance 3G services. Everything digital is interrelated, and one delay can hold up many other things.

Perhaps more importantly, the educational advantage of a highly "digitalised" society cannot be underestimated. The frustration of HD geeks, which seems to be the focal point at the moment, is the least of our concerns. The evolution of information technology has shown us that the faster a country moves, the faster all related prices will go down and the faster the access spreads to the people.

The need to move cautiously in the legal process is well appreciated. The problem is that prudence has rarely played a part in Thailand's embarrassingly slow move in the digital world. We can only guess what would have been if, say, the Shin empire had been taken out of the political equation and the liberalisation scheme been allowed to run a more natural course.

In other words, we were not slow because we were careful. We were slow because one thing that should never have been politicised was sucked into the centre of our politics. As a result of that, we have to be content with the belated MCOT announcement and hope that this time it won't be just another false hope.