The debates over HDTV and DTV standards did not result in the selection of uniform global standards or in uniformity of standards even at the regional or national levels. Within Western Europe, for example, the various pay-TV operators implemented digital television in distinct and somewhat incompatible ways. In the United States, the final compromise on DTV standards created a variety of DTV production and delivery standards. The major television networks and cable companies could not agree initially on which ones to deploy. Only in Japan were uniform HDTV standards adopted and deployed, but even there consumer acceptance was limited. Contrast this with the nearly global acceptance of such computer and telecommunications standards as the IBM-PC platform (combining Intel microprocessors with Microsoft operating systems), the TCP/IP protocols of the Internet, HTML (the scripting language of the World Wide Web), and the Linux operating system. Why did uniformity arise in these areas but not in advanced television?

The IBM-PC-platform

The broad acceptance of the IBM-PC-platform for personal computers resulted primarily from the ability of Intel and Microsoft to market a family of products and services that appealed to consumers. The main competitor to PC-platform was first the Apple II and later the Apple Macintosh platform. While Macintosh survived the general trend toward IBM-PC dominance, the platform of choice for the overwhelming majority of users by the late 1990s was the PC-platform.