HDTVNEWS.COM Says It All
MSTV's Victor Tawill put it another way. "In the 90s it was the cellular phone and audio. The next ten years is going to be our (broadcasters) time when it comes to wireless video and broadband applications. We have not invested in technology beyond video. No one is doing that for us. Unlike cellular, we have to do it ourselves. We have to create that opportunity."
"It is now up to ATSC to be as good as that player (broadcasting)." Ostroff declares.
I asked Victor, "Have we reached a stage where both systems are competitive enough in theoretical performance that it is a toss up?"
"I don't think so. The jury is still out on that."
Retailers are sensitive to the growing dilemma and potential delay. Arpad Toth, until recently the chief technical genius for Circuit City, and earlier with Philips, put it this way; "If we conclude that 8-VSB does not work, it could have fatal impact on DTV terrestrial broadcast. The consumers would get confused and we at retail would have a hard time to convince our customers what to believe in."
Bruce Babcock, vice president of Thomson Consumer Electronics in Indiana, bluntly seconds Toth's comment: "DTV is TANKED if the standard is changed."
The schism created by this issue has done much to shatter the once-sacred alliance between broadcast and manufacturing groups. The brick bats thrown from both sides left each sinking in a battlefield of quicksand. At minimum the public food fight sucked most of the confidence, light, and energy out from the propulsive side of the terrestrial DTV movement (the prime exception being that of datacasting, which keeps popping up with new companies). "The capital markets are very discouraged," reports a saddened veteran of the HDTV movement.
We best stay the course, most in the US said.
COFDM advocates have leapt across the pond like a British invasion making their claims of superiority about their beloved system. But it is not mere salesmanship from deluded messiahs. Unquestionably COFDM would stand today as a world class candidate for the US standard. It was born in the heart of Bell Labs so no need for one of those pesky NOT INVENTED HERE scenarios to play out over the American Flag. It is certainly more advanced than when Ren McMann and Birney Dayton were charged by ACATS in the early 90s with its evaluation. "If we made a mistake, we should certainly rectify it," says McMann. But he is quick to point out that even at their theoretical limits the two present distinct trade-offs. Neither one will do all that both taken together could. And this is where the blur begins since not everyone agrees that these trade-offs do trade just as they are advertised to do. It's the theoretical world vs. the real world.
The decision makers undoubtedly will want to know exactly what these trade-offs are. Of course, this is not a technical paper. It is a story about the meed for a decisions so I will not enter tough technical areas. I will say that the 8-VSB is very directional, has a longer reach (or less power required for the same reach), has a bigger constant payload, and handles impulse noise better than does COFDM. All of the claims are countered by the opposition with varying degrees and qualities of documentation. What 8-VSB has not proven to do is be received easily using a little pop up antenna in complex multipath environement, nor to work well in a highly dynamic multipath field--the kind one would have in a car (which does not overwhelm the multi-carrier equalization scheme of COFDM, but does cost that system error correction bits, i.e., payload).
If your station (call it A) is one with a growing and lucrative audience at the fringe of your reception area, and you have little in the way of urban canyons to confuddle the demodulator, and you don't foresee a lot of mobile data applications in your neck of the woods, you have no reason not to jump on 8-VSB side. It's ready. It's here. There are sets being made and in the stores. There will be no FCC muss, no big delay, things go as they are.
If you have a station that has a huge audience in the urban canyons (call it B) and little to worry over at the fringe that cannot be accommodated with affordable repeaters or cable, you have mobile application visions keeping you up nights, and your audience is a little slow to, or can't install outdoor antennas you are likely to jump on the COFDM bandwagon. You are waiting anyway to build out to go on the air,. By the time you do new sets will be ready...or so you hope! You might even benefit by the FCC getting tangled up in answering the question for so long you won't have to do anything prior to your own retirement. If you are a consumer and you move from place A to place B, you are going to want to receive decodable signals at both locations whether or not you buy that palm pilot or have a digital wireless hearing aid communicating with a ripe 900 number via your local broadcaster.
So, the question is: What is your transmission requirement? Which of the two systems is best tailored for serving it? And finally, do we need to invent another system to satisfy still more requirements showing up on the digital radar? If so, should that be invented now for this round of implementation, or the next round in ten years time?
Only one choice will likely be modulated at your transmitter. In the end just one must be chosen even if two, as Sinclair wants, are made legal options. An informed decision--trade-offs--including what you think is going to happen at the FCC.
Some of the trade-off are difficult to understand. They are not black and white but rather gray. Often they indirectly impact the business of broadcasting. It would be impossible to list them all.
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There is a claim, for instance, that the slow DTV sales in the US proves that the consumer is rejecting the "poor" 8-VSB performance. Sounds right. But is it true? Nobody wants that condition. Indeed the crux of the Sinclair concern is poor performace and inconvenience that dissuades consumers from outfitting for terrestrial DTV signals. This consumer "rejection," if true, must destroy hope for the DTV transition. It also denies you leverage when negotiating for cable carriage (if consumers can't, or are not able to receive/decode your signal anyway). The 8-VSB also leaves, as we have said before, diminished hope for digital fast mobile applications--unless something new is presented at the Task Force.
Europeans like to boast that from ease-of-reception of COFDM they sold half-million boxes with trouble-free rabbit ear digital reception. To boot their mobile options are left in tact. It has not been, of course, trouble-free nor picked up much with rabbit ears, but that has not stopped anyone from saying that just 10 to 20,000 8-VSB boxes in service in the big, big USA after a year proves something is amiss. They finger rejection of 8-VSB as the primary cause. European subsidies of COFDM decoders, of course, spurred a good deal of the European adoption rate as well as did the strong appeal for newly available multiple channel programming. The display is not part of their package either--that being already installed (the old set can be used). The US roll out is for HDTV--a box and di$play--which is thought the only digital approach to work in the US. Multiple channels are already a fact-of-life in 82% of the households served now by cable and satellite.
Notoriety over reception problems here has not spread into the pages of our press. Visits to DTV-topic web-sites are attracting hundreds, not millions upon millions. Upscale TV magazines politely omit tales of woe in their attempt to please advertisers. There is no real proof of this charge...just anecdotal speculations...which have proven very persuasive to the point of being held up as an established fact! Just to add to everyone's jitters the Europeans view the US strategy as a high-wire act. Any failure of the risky HDTV business, they say, will mean the complete and utter collapse of the whole US broadcast infrastructure!
Again, nothing could be further from the truth. Our sources say NTSC will continue unaffected in the absence of a success for the DTV movement, or even if it should get "tanked." For those predicting the end of television tune to Who Wants To Be a Millionaire along with 30+ million other viewers twice a week. TV is not dead or dying as much as it is in need of a programming overhaul, and that is happening. The networks and their affiliates are coming back. They are simply too attractive to lose a viewer forever to any other diversion, including the Internet. Tough times are proving to be good for network television--a muscle-building period--and ad revenues are way up to pay for the coming reformation.
In this scenario cited above most people I have talked to say that poor receivability has nothing to do with consumer uptake of DTV, at least so far. The culprit, they all say, is the 18 image formats and ambiguous meaning given to the term 'HDTV-ready' and the paucity of HDTV formatted programs. "An average person can remember...four to six interrelated items with any degree of accuracy." advises Arpad Toth. "...beyond...it is forgotten, or mixed together." Marketing 101: Confusion always slams shut the wallet of a consumer. The price of the equipment and shortage of programming head the list of market impediments now. Topping the list is confusion, of course. When other levels of markets enter in an unresolved reception problem could prove as daunting as Sinclair fears. Will 8-VSB be ready by then? Or, is COFDM required?
Satellites serving the US are delivering HDTV now--about 8 hours a day. Many think this is the only way to go. DISH--a DBB user thanks to Hughs' decision not to share their proprietary box, is about to market a lower cost satellite HD receiver that will have NxtWave chips and demodulate the satellite signals as well as it does terrestrial 8-VSB signals. It seems an answer, and that too is under fire by COFDM advocates who are leading US broadcasters to believe this strategy of building satellite sets is a showing of willful neglect to broadcasters. Terrestrial has little more than 5 hours of HDTV programming daily and that not everywhere nor guaranteed to be there next year. But the paranoid have concocted tales suggesting that CEA and its members are out to undermine broadcasters in order to snap up their spectrum in a fire sale for some diabolic plan to rule the new wireless world...leaving broadcasters out, of course, on their digital butts. Or, is that paranoid thinking?
Not incidentally the nation's first DTV broadcaster, WRAL in Raleigh, NC, reported to the DTV-6 Conference in LA a week ago that complaints about reception have not been registered from the nearly 2000 early adopters of 8-VSB receivers in their service area. The shortage of HDTV programs is far more the source of complaints, they say. WRAL-DT now sends a digital signal at full authorized power from their brand new DTV facility to a largely flat terrain with few urban canyons. But there are some canyons, and still no bothersome complaints are reported.
Such glowing reports have not slowed a creeping anxiety among "urban canyon" terrestrial signal providers. They have yet got their feet wet nor gone on the air digitally. Bad news travels faster than good among them. They believe/see/know about the critical directionality of the antennas and perceive that the poor multipath performance from the current crop of 8-VSB receivers is cause-enough for legitimate concern. And how about that mobile stuff with just a whip antenna?
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