The advanced industrial countries considered replacing the existing analog
television infrastructure with a new digital one in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Jeffrey Hart's study demonstrates how nationalism and regionalism combined with
conflicting ideas over technology to produce three different and incompatible
DTV standards in the U.S., Japan and Europe. The outcome has led to missed
opportunities in developing new technologies. Hart's work contributes to our
understanding of relations between business and government, and of competition
between the world's great economic powers.