Rationale

Digital transmission and multimedia possibilities have posed a series of challenges as well as offered a wealth of opportunities for traditional public service broadcasting institutions worldwide. In this paper, I explore the case of the Italian public broadcasting service (RAI) and its efforts to expand its public service remit. Since the late 1990s, RAI has enhanced its digital services through, among other things, the creation of RAI Net, RAI New Media and RAI Sat, whose overall mission is to position the corporation as a leader in the Italian new media market. Although RAI’s efforts to place itself in the multimedia environment have been somehow successful at the beginning (see for instance RAI News 24, a free-to-air all news digital channel), RAI’s digital expansion has been insufficient in the last few years. The main problems: Scarce attention to producing new contents to fuel the digital pipe line with quality programs, and myopic investments in the new technologies. The government’s and many politicians ’ recent focus on the digital switch (with the introduction of the Digital Terrestrial Television, DTT) has further drawn resources and know how away from the overall field of digitalization and new media, without however, a parallel attention to developing new contents for DTT channels. The result is that the so long announced digital switch over might result in a technological even