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Australia's new government is planning on using sport to drive digital television uptake, as reported in Melbourne's Age newspaper today. The government is considering allowing free-to-air stations to broadcast sporting events on their extra digital channels (which are not simulcast on the analogue broadcasts), so as to allow sport to stay free without compromising the stations' ratings on their main channels.

The previous government made a quite a mess of digital television policy, first banning commercial stations from multichannelling, and severely limiting the types of programming allowed to be broadcast on the second channels of the two publically funded broadcasters; they later removed some of these restrictions, but we're still stuck with the silly situation that the only commercial multichannelling allowed is on the high-definition channels.

Hopefully the new government's changes are the first step towards fixing the last government's rat's nest of problems.