The public relations battle is heating up over SDTV and HDTV transmission standards. The entire broadcasting industry has endorsed Zenith's VSBi digital transmission standard for both SDTV and HDTV, however, Bill Gates wants to take over this industry too and force the industry to go with progressive-scan transmission and to forgo HDTV.
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According to "Electronic Buyers' News", Compaq and other computer manufacturers will launch living room-friendly digital TV sets and PCs in 1998 using Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 98 and an MPEG-4 video- decompression codec, according to sources at a UBS Securities seminar held here earlier this month.
MPEG-4 and another video decompression device, called True Motion,
produced by New York-based Duck Corp., will be handled through Windows
98 software running on Pentium microprocessors, the sources said.
Stanley Marder, chief executive of Duck, said 10 million to 20 million
PCs sold in the 12 months after Windows 98 is introduced will be able to receive digital- TV (DTV) broadcasts after they are equipped with an $80 tuner board. He said virtually all PCs shipped in 1998, including a living room-TV version, will come equipped with digital DVD-ROM drives. PC industry people at the seminar were upbeat about the likelihood of the U.S. broadcast industry agreeing to DTV transmissions using progressive-scan format, which can be displayed on computer screens.
Most broadcasters are expected to initially forgo the full-blown high-
definition-TV format, which would take up 6 MHz of bandwidth for a single program. Instead, broadcasters at the seminar said they are
strongly inclined to start with standard-definition-television (SDTV)
formats that have slightly less resolution but allow the transmission of multiple digital programs as well as a wide variety of digital data
services.
Intel's Misener said SDTV gives broadcasters a potentially vast revenue stream by allowing the downloading of huge amounts of digital data to home PCs or living room PC-TVs during off-hours. Only the large installed base of PCs can receive this data dump, motivating the broadcast industry to adopt progressive-scan transmission to reach this market, he said.
Marty Yudkovitz, president of interactive media and business development at NBC, and Anthony Carrara, president of Paramount Stations Group, said they are seriously considering progressive-scan SDTV digital transmissions.
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Misener is wrong. Zenith's patented VSBi transmissions can also broadcast in any one of 17 different modes including the SDTV one. Noticed also that no broadcaster has endorsed the "Mitel" plan, nor will they (hedging of Yudkovitz and Carrara notwithstanding). It's not in their self-interest to allow Gates and Gove to dictate how the TV industry operates.
TV manufacturers aren't doing much to clarify the issue on Wall Street. If Compaq and others can promise to deliver 10 to 20 million SDTV compatible computers in about two years, Zenith, Thompson, Mitsubishi and others ought to be countering with statements that they can manufacturer even more SDTVs and utilize a much superior transmission standard (free from the computer industry's tenacles).
Remember, Zenith earns a royalty on every SDTV as well as HDTV sold which uses their proprietary VSBi transmission standard.
The problem for Zenith stock holders seems to be is that the Street is buying the BS issued by "Mitel". How else to explain ZE a $10 stock?
Where is the leadership at Zenith? |
