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The UK Government is drawing up the legislative framework for digital terrestrial broadcasting. Six frequency channels will be made available initially for television, each able to carry at least three television channels, possibly many more. They will need to be multiplexed into a single digital signal for each frequency channel. In addition, seven radio frequency channels will be made available, each with the capacity to offer at least six digital stereo programme services. One of these channels will be allocated to the BBC for national services, another for independent national radio, four for...

The UK telecommunications regulator has produced a consultation paper on the regulation of broadband switched mass-market services (and their substitutes) delivered by telecommunications systems. It suggests that the future form of such services is uncertain but the market is most likely to tend towards the development of broadband switched mass-market services. Although over-regulation should be avoided, potential investors need to be given an indication as to what the regulatory regime of the future is likely to look like. Successful policies from the regulation of the narrowband world can be...

The UK Government issued its long-awaited proposals on media ownership in May 1995. The proposals are for a reform of the currently highly complex rules governing concentration of ownership in broadcasting and cross-media ownership. The Government has accepted that it should retain special rules for the media rather than leaving control to ordinary competition law, but has aimed to introduce greater flexibility in order to reflect rapid technological change. The proposals deal seperately with short and long term changes. In the short term, new legislation will permit newspaper groups with less...

In a recent libel case the House of Lords has held that, in order to determine the meaning of certain words, it is necessary to take into account the context in which the words were used and the mode of publication. Plaintiffs were two actors in a popular television series, whose faces were superimposed on pornographic pictures in a computer game. The News of the World published an article on the computer game with two photographs of the visual display, under the headline "Strewth! What's Harold up to with our Madge?". The text of the article explained that the plaintiffs were the unwitting victims...

The BBC had planned to broadcast throughout the UK a 40-minute interview met the Prime Minister in its current affairs programma Panorama on 2 April. In Scotland, though not in the rest of the UK, local authority elections were due to be held on 6 April. Other political parties commenced proceedings in the Court of Session, the supreme court of Scotland, on the morning of 2 April to obtain an interim order prohibiting the broadcast until the elections had taken place. The court decided that the parties established a prima facie case that the broadcast would breach the BBC's duty of impartiality...