It's interesting. Forgive me if this is a little verbose, but you all have reminded me of some things about which I've been thinking for a while.
There is a direct parallel between how Europe handled DVB receivers and how they handled mobile phones. I remember in 2005, I went to the CTIA show (the big conference in the U.S. for the mobile phone industry) and there was really no U.S. handset innovation going on. What there was, was all back-end, carrier-side stuff. On the other hand, in one corner of the show floor was a vibrant set of large and small (mostly small) vendors with zillions of innovative apps for GSM handsets on 5 different operating systems.
It seemed to me like Europe apparently didn't do anywhere near as much carrier/SIM locking as the U.S. did. This is just my impression, but people bought whatever handset they wanted, and were pretty comfortable sticking their SIM in it, and changing as they found something they liked better.
Similarly, I was a subscriber to the old Tele-Satellite magazine for years, and one glance at that made it clear that there was nowhere near as much locking of turnkey-receivers to one downlink provider in Europe as there was in the U.S. There were a plethora of providers, and people got CAMs and smartcards and plugged in the ones for whatever programming they wanted. This obviously added some complexity, which is why some receivers had multiple slots, but there were receivers that looked like decorative art objects, PVRs, and everything in between.
I think part of the challenge is that in the U.S. one of the two major DBS services was built upon standards that pre-dated DVB (DirecTV) and only one was actually using vanilla DVB (D!SH, at least until they started "turbo" modulations). Plus, just as with the Apple model, there are some user experience benefits to coherent management of both the hardware and content from a single provider, even if, in the process, one's choices get constrained.
I don't want to get too far afield, but what's interesting is how the main providers in the U.S. seemed to fall into different sides of certain spectra. For example, my personal take was that DirecTV looked like someone cranked the sharpness control up too high, with all kinds of distracting edges and artifacts, while D!SH looked (to me) like someone smeared petroleum jelly all over the lens for a glamour shot.
That's why I paid for Canadian satellite TV for 5 years - Even though the Motorola receivers had a UI that looked like something steam-powered from the Soviet Union, the picture quality was pretty close to what the C-band people were getting with the DSR-922s and an HD decoder.
What's funny is that the whole time, the FCC has been fanatical about trying to decouple the "navigation device" (a.k.a set-top box) from the particular content provider, to the maximal extent possible - which is why the CableCARD happened.
I was sort of hoping that we'd see some kind of renaissance with ATSC, despite its yet-again-not-world-standard basis, and arguably daunting complexity. What's funny is that a lot of the additional services in ATSC are basically IP data streams, so you'd think that app developers would eventually rise to the occasion.
I think the parallel I see with development of new services and hardware for ATSC (and even satellite TV) is similar to what we saw with the early Internet. I helped build the early commercial Internet, so I remember what it was like to go head-to-head with incumbent industries who believed in their hearts that they should "own the app" (vs transport), but profoundly failed at understanding how to build applications that people actually wanted to use. The telcos SUCKED at trying to create applications that were even remotely interesting, but an open-standard platform allowed everyone with an idea to try to create a thing.
In short, the Europeans kind of whupped the U.S. in the early development of consumer options for mobile phone services and hardware (at least pre-iPhone), as well as DTH/DBS satellite television hardware, but it was sort of the reverse for development of Internet services and applications.
Now, for extra credit, who remembers the connection between FedEx and the development of DBS satellite TV in the United States?
