Interview with Dr. John Abel, President of DataCast, Part 3 — DTV Station Adoption and DataCast's Plans

by Dale Cripps
Tuesday, January 19, 1999

Part 3
HDTV News: I have to give a little round of applause to some of these transmitter makers who have shown some classic salesmanship.

Yes. I had discussions with three different transmitter manufacturers and asked them how many stations would be on the air by the end of 1999. I got three different numbers. They ranged from 150 stations at the low end and 250 at the high end.

HDTV News: We did a survey of 750 stations. There wasn't one that said they are not going to digital. It was more a matter of their market size which determines when.

They appear to be in 3 camps, setting PBS aside for the moment. . .

Camp one is the people that made a commitment to do it have to do it and have to do it by the end of say, 1999. I'm not even talking about the early guinea pigs. I'm talking about everybody through 99; and I think that group is very focused. They're kind of wringing their hands about it, but they're very focused . They are the ones that are investigating all ways of using that transmission. They're told by management if they are going to spend all that money they have to look at every possible way to maximize any kind of revenue.

In the second camp are the stations competing with those stations in those first markets. They're watching. They're also thinking, "Maybe we need to convert for competitive reasons".

The third camp are in small markets that don't have to convert until after 2002. I would put them in a category of "I'm going to wait until the last minute." Some of them have said, "I'm going to be the last one in my market to convert; I want others to build the market. The cost of the equipment will be lower, bugs worked out of it." It's hard to argue with that. There's no big money in those small markets for them anyway. It's going to cost them a lot of money, so, I think maybe everybody in these three camps are kind of proceeding rationally, as you would expect them to.
You've given us the theory, now what is your company doing?

We're in the process of making a move to DTV. It's hard to get money for NTSC only. NTSC may be an issue for smaller markets, as we talked about. NTSC will not die for a long time, if it does die. So, we're in the process of trying to move to DTV, and we have a DTV affiliate here WJLA. We're in the process of building a demonstration there of DTV broadcasting to PCs mostly in the data component, the streaming video applications as I talked about. We made that operational the end of the year.

We are mainly working on the receiver cards. There are a limited number of prototypes right now. Intel has a few. That's why I'm interested in these Philips/LG electronics cards.

HDTV News: Thank you Dr. John Abel.

Dale Cripps