More press:
By Jeffrey S. Young
Get ready for the next revolution in the digital age. The gargantuan
Orson Welles-size broadcast industry is getting ready for the digital
age but its efforts may be made redundant by the humble personal
computer. The first steps will occur this week when a tiny Sunnyvale,
Calif. startup--InnovaCom--unveils a broadcast digital video system for
the professional television industry.
InnovaCom (see sidebar) is guaranteed a rapt audience. The venue will be
Las Vegas, at the gigantic annual--NAB--convention, a television and
broadcasting industry lovefest. This is where the technology and the
showbiz of the television industry come together in an extravaganza of
hustle and hype.
The PC motto of "Faster, smaller and cheaper" is now set to be applied
to the broadcasting industry thanks to the innovations in digital video.
The 1,500 over-the-air television broadcasters in the U.S. are between a
rock and hard place. The Federal Communications Commission has finally
decided that in order to hold on to their existing slots of
spectrum--the traditional VHF and UHF channels--the country's
broadcasters have to start providing some digital television programming
by this fall. The program starts with the biggest ten markets in the
country, then reaches the top thirty by a year from now, and continues
on a fast pace until every station in the country is transmitting
programming in digital format by the year 2003.
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The PC motto of "Faster, smaller and cheaper" is now set to be applied
to the broadcasting industry.
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Sounds good, but there are a few small problems with this noble,
government-mandated step into the next century. First, there is as yet
no clear way to get there from here. Competing technical, philosophical
and marketing approaches make it impossible to find a common ground.
Every television equipment maker has a different way to get the TV
stations to the new digital age--and most of the systems involve
throwing out the old gear they have and replacing it with scads of new
digital cameras, tape decks, editing suites and transmitters.
The high definition standard itself allows for a number of different
screen sizes, formats and resolutions. There's a wide-screen format with
a 16 by 9 aspect ratio (aspect ratio is the relationship between the
horizontal and vertical measurements of the image), compared with the
current screen size of 4 by 3. There can be interlaced versus
progressive scan arrangements: Interlacing is the current model in
television, where every frame is made up of two fields, which when
displayed sequentially appear to be a single frame. On the other hand, a
computer uses progressive scanning, where the entire screen is painted
in one pass, producing a richer image and eliminating flickering.
Resolution is based on the number of horizontal lines that make up the
image. The more lines, the more resolution. In the new digital TV world
these can range from 480 (equivalent to today's analog systems and
called SDTV or standard definition) to 1,080, which is the maximum
called for in the HDTV specifications.
Welcome to the plethora of formats and acronyms and abbreviations. What
makes this so ugly for the broadcasters who have to buy now to meet
their deadlines later this year, is that they have to make a decision
soon. And the decision will cost millions of dollars. Take John Greene,
a vice president of Capitol Broadcasting Inc. of Raleigh, N.C. His local
station--WRAL--had the first experimental license in the country from
the FCC to broadcast in HDTV. For more than a year he has been
struggling to get equipment that works from suppliers, to shoot,
manipulate, and edit signals, transmitters to send them out, and
receivers to receive the signals. "Nothing works together, and worse, no
one knows how to make it work together," he says. "There are missing
pieces of technology, things that no one knows how to do. Every time we
try and do something, we have to invent another piece of the puzzle."
Watching digital Seinfeld
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