Abstract: This report explores the economic factors underlying television and the policy arguments that emanate from them in the all-digital television world and reveals where differing perspectives and debates take place among economists and economic policy analysts and the roots of those differences. The report shows how technological and policy changes have altered the television market and created submarkets during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the different economic bases of licence-fee, advertising-supported, and paid television, and how they compete and coexist as well as clarifying why contemporary changes in television distribution are altering the economics and structure of broadcasting and how the developments alter the context for future UK broadcast policy making.