This essay was inspired by one of my ex-colleagues (hi, Carl!) who was discussing MHP with me one day in the office. Carl is originally from Sierra Leone, and can see digital TV both from the technologically-advanced, Western point of view and from the point of view someone from a developing country. During the discussion, he asked me a question which no-one had asked me before - "What is the use of digital TV? Is it just a rich Westerner's toy?"

There's as many different answers to this as there are people answering the question, ranging from the polarized"Yes" and "No" camps that surround any technology to the more realistic middle ground. Personally, I'm in the middle ground, somewhere closer to the "Yes" camp than to the "No" camp. Before I go any further, I have to declare my biases: I'm a child of the West, from a developed country, who has been working in high-tech and digital TV for the last ten years. More to the point, I'm one of the authors of the MHP specification, and so I'll freely admit to having a skewed perspective on this.

So why would someone in a developing country benefit from interactive TV? We in the West have become so used to the TV as an entertainment medium that we forget other types of content:

• News delivery - Hey, I grew up in the UK watching the BBC and ITN, I've seen decent news broadcasting. CNN doesn't count.
• Public-service broadcasting - The BBC: enough said.
• Educational broadcasts - not just the kids shows, but the advanced courses offered by some universities for distance-learning programs.
• Local cultural issues - When I was young, a Welsh-language TV channel started broadcasting in Wales where I grew up. This helped maintain the Welsh language in the local community, and gave people with Welsh as their first language their first access to TV entertainment in their own native language.

Wiring a country for Internet access with PCs gets hard - how much would it cost to wire a sub-Saharan country to the stage where 50% of the population have access to PCs as an education and news-delivery medium? (Answer: I don't know; but probably more money than you can shake a stick at, plus the stick). TV broadcast equipment isn't cheap, but satellites already in orbit allow you to reach an area the size of Western Europe with a single broadcast.

A PC is more general, but as a cheap education mechanism, it sucks. The main thing it'll teach you is that it's hard to set up a PC for Internet access and keep it working when you don't have access to the latest hardware and software. (All the geeks cry "Linux!" - as an ex-Linux sysadmin, it's good, but not that good). Once you've got to set it up, you've got to develop the software and make sure it runs on every machine that's being used. That's tough. It's tough in a society where PCs and the expertise to use and maintain them are easily available. Imagine trying to do it in a remote place with a limited set of skills and spare parts.

A TV, on the other hand, has the force of all the world's CE companies trying to make the thing as cheap and bulletproof as possible. The same for set-top boxes: every company is trying to squeeze costs. Even better, it's easy to set up and keep working. Finally, publishing content on the TV is possible for everyone, despite what you may think - witness public access TV in the US. This may not be interactive content, but even in a digital world,not all content will be interactive.

Imagine what would happen if the UN (for instance - if you don't like the UN, choose any other organization with enough resources to do it, and that may have an interest in doing it) was to set up a TV station broadcasting educational and health-related material to sub-Saharan Africa and spend some money using old TV sets and satellite receivers from the West to provide access to this information source. As well as the content they developed themselves, they would be giving people access to content from other cultures that's broadcast unscrambled. In the UK, I can pick up signals from all over Europe and North Africa from the Astra satellite.

OK, so far we can do this with any satellite TV system. Why do we care about interactivity? It's very simple - educational material is OK, but reading a textbook is nowhere near as good as having a teacher to talk to. Interactive TV isn't as good as a teacher, but it does allow students to interact with the material they're learning and explore concepts on their own. It's this benefit that Interactive TV offers the developing nations: while the West can make do with interactive versions of Jackass and Big Brother, it's also possible to use the technology to give people a chance to improve their lives while still maintaining their culture and showing it to the wider world.

When we were designing MHP, none of this entered our minds of course - we were all in it to make money. But sometimes technology can have a benefit outside of its creator's intentions. I'm not naive enough to think that this will happen automatically, but the communications revolution can do more than just flood a country with Western entertainment. But people have to be prepared to develop the content, and to broadcast it, and to provide the equipment to receive it. It's not a trivial exercise, but it has the chance to reach people in remote areas where other communication media can't reach.

The expansion of cable and satellite TV in the West has let us see new cultures in a way that we couldn't do ten years ago. I'm a Westerner living in Taiwan, and I regularly watch TV shows produced in the US, Taiwan, the UK, Germany, Australia and Japan, as well as others. At the same time, it can help to preserve cultures by broadcasting in their own languages, with their own values and traditions. It can also allow these cultures to be shared with other people, both in that country and in the wider region.

Is digital TV a panacea for the problems of bringing education to developing countries while preserving their cultures? Of course not - I'm not idealistic or naive enough to think that. But, it can be a valuable tool in helping to improve the lives of millions, if it's used in the right way.

At the end of the day, the West has to help in any effort to do this. Money isn't enough - it will take expertise, resources other than cash and a whole bunch of determination. Maybe interactive TV can help in a way that some other technologies can't, however. Technology on its own can't solve all the problems of a developing country. But if a technology lets us bring the communications revolution to a large group of people who never had it, maybe it can be a step in the right direction.