You sure must want E-Mail. HBO on HDTV.............................
mediacentral.com
HBO Executive Optimistic About HDTV's Mid-'98 Deployment
By Jim Barthold
Home Box Office will begin to deliver high definition TV by mid-1998 if all the pieces fall into place, according to Robert Zitter, the network's senior VP- technology operations.
"I guess in terms of how we're doing, I'm pretty optimistic in terms of the pieces falling into place," he says.
One piece that hasn't been nailed down yet: equipment availability.
"What we said was that it would be the middle of next year with one caveat, pending the equipment availability," Zitter says. "I wasn't playing a game there."
Zitter adds that when the announcement was made about HBO's HDTV plans, he had been assured by various vendors that the technology needed in origination, transmission and reception would be ready.
"Everyone told us what we needed to hear to give us some pretty good confidence that we can make it," he says.
Since then, things have changed enough to prompt Zitter to label the mid-1998 launch target as "aggressive." But, he adds, "I'm reasonably confident that we can make it by the middle of next year, certainly by some time in the third quarter."
Zitter says programming would be encrypted in the ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) format and sent through the satellite to the cable headend.
"What it needs when it hits the cable system is an IRT, a transcoder that takes that multiplex that's in the ATSC format and decrypts it. That's the thing that doesn't exist today that we have to make sure is put in place," Zitter says.
He notes that the IRT transcodes the QPSK (Quadrature Phase Shift Keying) satellite modulation to QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) for transmission over the cable TV system.
"That product is a similar product to what people are using today in headends," Zitter says.
One major stumbling block to delivering high definition TV delivery could be the television sets. The two big questions: When will HDTV sets hit the market? Can they actually receive and deliver the QAM-modulated datastreams?
Those issues are the focus of discussion between such groups as CableLabs and the consumer electronics industry, Zitter says.
"The cable industry is trying to say [that] here's how we're planning to deliver programming and that programming is probably going to be broadcast channels, as well as cable channels," he says. "What they're trying to say to the consumer electronics guys is here's how we'd like to interface to the TV."
Broadcasters have adopted 8-VSB (Vestigial Side Band) modulation and cable has QAM. TV sets would have to be able to receive both.
(July 11, 1997) |
