"...Communications Minister Maria del Rosario Guerra – whose last name in Spanish ironically means war..." <-- SOOOO childish.... Grow up!!

I'm not sure how much of this is a financial deal win, and how much is good old politics.

In the history of TV formats, it's been a mixture of both.

NTSC was the first method of encoding colour, but did result in the wonderful hue control, and some very surreal colours. Which is exactly the reason why the UK held back and continued working on the system to make the colour stable, this resulted in PAL a few years later.
The French feared their own TV industry (which I assume spent most of the time at Lunch or on holiday like they do today), would loose out to mass production from other countries, so decided on their own system called SECAM, which did have the nice feature of multiple audio features.
At this point the Eastern block were considering a system, and obviously wouldn't want their poor oppressed people being able to see anything nice, so they certainly didn't want the same TV system as on the other side of the wall... Scratch PAL then, and they wouldn't want them to see anything from Japan on their Eastern shores, so scratch NTSC. Plus of course it was the system of the evil consumerist society.
This left the obvious choice of SECAM. It wasn't used by anyone except the French and their colonies, which were safely far enough from them to avoid anyone seeing anything they shouldn't.

So my immediate thought is the Colombian government probably like the idea of being able to restrict what their population can see, and not accidentally letting them see the wobbly walls of US soap operas!

I don't blame them to be honest!

Nice round-up. Few people were expecting it. I guess ISDB-T and DVB-T will 'share' South America, where as ATSC will be 'successful' in the Caribbean (except Cuba, of course).

Just two little clarifications: Portafolio is an economic newspaper, not a magazine. And the La Patria article is actually a wire from local news agency Colprensa, whose full version is available at http://www.larepublica.com.co//archivos/EMPRESAS/2008-08-28/japon-cuestiona-objetividad-del-proceso-de-tv-digital_52549.php

"Colombia has struck a blow to American ambitions in Latin America"

and

"declared defeat for the Americans"

makes Fernando sound like he thinks Americans really give two flying fvcks whether some other country uses a different standard or not.

Take it from an American Fernando, no one here cares.

After all of years of prep & hype, with NO change in image or quality of signal, this over air broadcast stuff seems like magnetic hammer pounding, pounding at ones senses.

Honestly, with so many choices, simply ending over air TV broadcast would have been best.
drashek

Well, I suppose we are following, unless Chávez decides to go with the chinese.

Good news. Australia too uses the DVB-T standard so this means TVs and STBs should fall in price due to greater production worldwide.