Outside of the western hemisphere, in the world of commercial broadcast TV, who owns the transmitter, tower, antenna, etc? Also, if not owned by the broadcaster (I'm thinking of IBA in the U.K.), who sets up the video, audio, decides on processing, does the maintenance, etc.?

TNX/73

If the broadcaster does not own their equipment, they usually do not maintain their equipment. The transmitter owners usually dictate equipment choices and choose and pay the engineers who maintain the transmitter equipment.

What I was really thinking about is overseas. Particularly Australia, Western Eurpoe, etc...

http://www.txaustralia.com.au/

Since the inception of digital TV broadcast, the video level, the audio level setup etc. is solely withing the studio operations and has nothing to do with transmitter setup. The transmitter receives an MPEG2 transport stream and the transport is modulated as per the countries adopted standard. Europe is DVB-T and DVB-T2, Japan ISDB, China DMB-T etc.

So today's TV broadcast transmitter is all about setting up the efficiency of delivering a transport stream and has nothing to do with the previous analog concerns about the video or audio quality directly.

OK... I guess I need to be thinking about this question as more in the analog days!