I was thinking of televisions as tools to help primitive third world
societies become more socialized and tolerant of Western values.
For all the *damage* that TV has done, it's really COMMERCIAL
BROADCAST television that has done the damage, *not* the technology
of television itself.
We now have new television technologies like DVD, HDTV, and digital video over broadband internet, that render NTSC television hardware obsolete. Soon, I believe, there will be an internet infrastructure upgrade in which very large chunks of previously allocated RF spectrum are reallocated as public spectrum for use in a broadband internet backbone.
This is the public spectrum microcellular model in which gps-based broadband autorouter/proxies are mass produced.
These "content distribution nodes" will be sealed black boxes with parallel dsps and gigabytes of ram. Sort of like PCS cell sites, except much higher bandwidth, and with variable power, so that cell density changes result in automatic reconfiguration of the nodes.
This will result in an internet infrastructure in the industrialized countries that supports broadband web access, including streaming wavelet-based HDTV.
Since this technology can be implemented with today's technologies, the only impediment to implementation is the current volume of inventory of old technologies that sits in the wholesale and retail distribution warehouses of the "Western" countries.
I would like to suggest that the developed countries procede on a systematic, region by region basis, and replace old spectrum devices with digital hdtv interactive devices. The old spectrum "broadcast" devices can then be loaded up on freighters and sent to third world countries (see http://www.worldbank.org/) and donated for the purpose of assisting these nations in the process of development.
Rather than repeating the commercial broadcast "mistakes" of appealing to the lowest common deonominator of visceral programming, we could instead fit these "low definition" devices (now obsolete in the west) with digital set-top decoders capable of providing low bandwidth WWW access.
In the process, we could be balancing the material wealth, by
providing third-world countries with what amounts to Western riches.
They will not mind that the Westerners consider these items to be
"hand me downs". In the process, we could accomplish the objective
decreasing international tensions.
Why do Americans need AM/FM/UHF/VHF, when the content from these spectrum hogging broadcast communications systems can be reallocated to public use low-power digital microcellular?
Once the transport is in place, and the delivery terminals are installed in, for example, the Arab world, how should access be handled? How should automatic content selection be programmed?