sondjata is right. The marketplace controls what we watch TV on, and what shows we watch, but the Fed controls the airwaves themselves, and the move to digital does free up a LOT of public airspace on the radio waves. Especially since you can like 10 times the channels via digital in half the space you did with analog. You can stack channels, individual stations can have up to like 9 channels all on the same frequency instead of just one like before.

So overall this switch to digital is hugely beneficial. On a side note, we made the jump from analog to digital cellular some 15-20 years back and the airspace it freed up was enormous. Overall though, there's only a limited amount of available bandwidth in the EM spectrum, and anything that can be used to maximize that limited space is always welcome.