Lucent christens digital TV endeavor 1st HDTV encoder shipped
David Schwab
08/20/98
The Star-Ledger Newark, NJ
FINAL
Page 037
(Copyright Newark Morning Ledger Co., 1998)
It's just a box, 24 inches high and 26 inches wide, about the size of a small television. But it contains the computing power of 50 top- of-the-line PCs and took some of the world's leading engineers and scientists 10 years to design and build.
Lucent Technologies yesterday shipped its first digital TV encoder from the company's Murray Hill headquarters, sending the unit on its way to the first of a group of televisions stations that will begin beaming digital signals in November.
Before the crated device was loaded onto a truck- destined for Cincinnati- engineers and executives planned to gather on the loading dock of Lucent's Building 2 for a champagne sendoff.
''It's a christening, like for a battleship," said Chris Pfaff, a spokesman for Lucent Digital Video, a wholly owned venture of Lucent. "But we're not breaking anything." Each unit costs between $90,000 and $450,000.
The shipment is yet another signal that HDTV- super-clear, high- definition television- is on the way. But for most consumers, HDTV is probably still a long way off.
The first HDTV sets are expected to be available at some area stores in October- for about $7,000. That's for a 56-inch, projection-style television.
Some retailers say it will be four or five years before HDTV assumes the got-to-have-it status of CD players, thanks mostly to the high cost of the units, the limited digital programming so far and some still unsettled technical issues.
''I don't think it will be until about 2002 or 2003 that it will become 'Hey, I've got to have one of these products,'" said Rick Jones, president of Edison-based Tops Appliance City.
In addition, most customers are satisfied with the quality of today's less expensive, analog televisions, he said. A conventional projection-screen television can be had for $1,000.
Supplies of the new digital gizmos will be extremely limited to begin with, which is one reason Jones predicts Tops won't have enough to meet demand when they eventually hit the shelves.
''There are always people who want to have the latest and greatest who have a fairly high disposable income," he said.
Barry Watkins, a spokesman for Nobody Beats the Wiz, said digital televisions will be sold by early fall. He could not say how much they might cost.
Twenty-six television stations nationwide, including WCBS in New York, have volunteered to start digital broadcasts in November. The Federal Communications Commission has ruled that network affiliates in the 10 largest markets, including New York, must follow by next May.
All others will go digital by 2003, though they must keep broadcasting conventional analog programs through at least 2006.
Lucent is shipping the encoders to the broadcast division of Harris Corp., which sells the units- called a FlexiCoder- to television stations nationwide.
In January, Harris and Lucent announced an alliance to sell HDTV equipment in North America. Harris, a $3.8 billion electronics company based in Melbourne, Fla., already supplies about 60 percent of conventional television transmitters.
The encoders are assembled in Murray Hill, a process that takes between seven and 10 days.
Inside are six boards of chips, supplied by Lucent and IBM, which reduce the television signal from a camera into the computer language of ones and zeros- a far more complex task than reversing the process, which is done by decoders atop television sets.
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Sounds expensive! |
