Finland's first nationwide digital television broadcasts began on Monday.

   

While the advance fanfare over this latest change on the Finnish television landscape has been considerable, the launch was more modest than originally planned.

   

In addition to existing analog channels, only four new digital channels started operations on Monday. Three of them are run by the national public-service broadcaster, the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE: the Swedish-language channel YLE FST, the cultural, educational, and documentary channel YLE Teema as well as the news channel YLE 24. In addition, there is the sports channel Urheilukanava which is jointly owned by MTV3, SanomaWSOY, and the national lottery and pools operator Veikkaus.

   

They will be joined later by a number of other channels, which now only broadcast information about upcoming programming.

Currently, digital television broadcasts

in Finland can only be seen using a rented decoder box: the digital decoders are not yet on sale.

   

In Helsinki there were queues of people waiting to get their rental boxes from the cable TV operator HTV on Monday (picture above, right). In Vaasa, viewers have been reserving their equipment from June.

   

Retailers have not yet received digital adapter boxes for sale, but are expecting to take delivery of the first ones sometime this week.

According to one expert

, Pertti Näränen, a researcher at the Department of Journalism and Communication at the University of Tampere, Finlnad needs digital television in order to secure a strong position for domestic TV programming.

   

"Otherwise digitalisation that is coming through the satellites would have reduced the audience, and the position of national television culture would have been weakened."

   

Näränen is currently working on a doctoral thesis on the effect of digital television on journalism. He has also written about the communications policy implications of the decisions to be made on digital television.

"Digital television

can be an interesting novelty for the public, because it extends the supply and brings additional services", Näränen says. "It remains to be seen when the viewers really join in."

   

Resistance to change is a common reaction with respect to digital television, but Näränen says that this could change.

   

"In any case, the year 2006 would be far too early a time to end analog broadcasting. This could not happen without very forceful measures. It would require public subsidies for the distribution of digital boxes, for instance, and perhaps some kinds of ‘digital box support persons'. Otherwise large sections of the population might be pushed aside."