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Fake TV process lands clients // With no plans for high definition
video, Fox Network and others hunt a substitute
JOEL BRINKLEY
483 Words
3533 Characters
06/28/97
Austin American-Statesman
D6
(Copyright 1997)
Yves Faroudja owns a small Silicon Valley company specializing in
sophisticated, high-priced equipment that improves the quality of a
conventional television picture, and in the early days almost a
decade ago, ''we sold quite a few of them to people who were trying
to fake HDTV,'' he recalled with a laugh.
This spring, realizing that the real thing -- high-definition
television sets using digital signals -- was ready to hit the market
in just over a year, Faroudja Laboratories began trying to find a
new place for itself in the TV world. Over the next few years,
after all, the demand for Faroudja equipment that improves
conventional television images is likely to diminish and ultimately
vanish altogether.
''The high-definition situation makes me very nervous,'' Faroudja
acknowledged.
A few weeks ago, like an answer to a dying man's prayers, a new
group of customers suddenly and unexpectedly appeared:
Broadcast-television executives who say they want to use Faroudja's
equipment to fake HDTV.
Half a dozen major broadcast- television companies, including the
Fox television network of News Corp. and the Tribune Broadcasting
operation of Tribune Co. have asked Faroudja whether the company can
* provide line-doublers, as the lab's core products are called, that
will improve the resolution of a standard, broadcast-television
signal and convert it to digital form. Most of the companies are
trying to avoid spending millions of dollars right away to buy the
new equipment that would be needed to offer true high-definition
television.
''We are hoping Faroudja can up-convert our signal,'' said Ira
Goldstone, a vice president with Tribune Broadcasting, which owns
16 television stations nationwide. ''That way we don't have to
change our tape machines, routers, cameras -- everything -- in the
next 18 to 24 months.''
Fox Television executives and their leader, Rupert Murdoch, have
long maintained that the public will show little interest in HDTV,
so Fox has no immediate plans to offer it. The other three major
networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, have all pledged to broadcast some
high-definition programming, though only CBS has described the exact
technical parameters it will use. Last week, the Home Box Office
unit of Time Warner announced that it would offer high-definition
programming starting next year.
Several Fox network executives met with the leaders of Faroudja
Labs early this month, and Andrew Setos, an executive vice president
for Fox, said the network was not ready yet to say exactly how the
Faroudja equipment might be used, except to say, ''We hope to use
some Faroudja technologies to make our picture better.''
But Michael Moone, president of Faroudja Labs, said Tribune, Fox
and some of the other broadcasters with whom his company had held
less formal talks, all had recently spent a lot of money buying a
wide range of conventional TV equipment.
''And the last thing they want to do is take all that expensive
equipment and make it obsolete overnight,'' Moone said.
I0607 * End of document. |
