Interesting article from EE Times on the digital front.
Digital-TV standard sketchy on the details -- Forced to guess on formats for full-blown DTV, vendors try 'transition products'
first
Source: Electronic Engineering Times
Electronic Engineering Times: Las Vegas, Nev. - The wrapping may be off the Federal Communications Commission's Christmas gift of a U.S. standard for
high-definition digital television, but the recipients are still looking for the assembly instructions.
After years of wrangling that pitted the computer industry against consumer- electronics manufacturers, the FCC approved a compromise standard late last month,
and it promises to allocate digital channels to broadcasters this year (see related story, page 80). "It's showtime" for the consumer-electronics and service suppliers
that have awaited some federal guidance on digital-TV implementation for nearly a decade, said Peter Fannon, chairman of Citizens for HDTV, a coalition
supporting a rapid transition to high-definition digital systems.
Yet many system vendors say the compromise standard leaves some implementation issues unresolved and opens the door to incompatibility problems. That has
some vendors opting to concentrate on transitional products, such as set-top boxes and embedded TV Internet appliances, until the architectural issues for digital
TV are decided in the marketplace. Such products will dominate the floor when the Winter Consumer Electronics Show opens here this week.
TV and PC manufacturers planning digital products for a 1998 launch are left to their own devices in choosing video formats, frame rates, pixel formats and aspect
ratios. And the must make such decisions without knowing which video formats broadcasters themselves will use.
According to some sources who had supported the original Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) spec, choices for digital TV video formats are 24-,
30- or 60-frames/second progressive scan with a pixel format of 1,280 x 720; 24- or 30-frames/s progressive scan with a pixel format of 1,920 x 1,080; and 60-
frames/s interlaced scan with a pixel format of 1,920 x 1,080. Digital TV may ultimatey be based on a 60-frames/s, 1,920- x 1,080-pixel progressive format when
that becomes technically feasible.
Ron Richard, vice president of planning and technology at Matsushita Electric Corp. of America, said the compromise standard multiplies the complexity and the
marketing challenges associated with first-generation systems. "We have to do a lot of homework and figure out broadcasters' plans," he said, adding that
Matsushita must balance cost concerns against the need for flexibility.
Industry observers, including some regulators, said they fear that the FCC's decision to leave video-format selection to the market could result in sub- standard
image reproduction among some TVs and PCs. In extreme cases, incompatibility between the system vendor's and broadcaster's chosen format could cause the
screen to go dark.
That prospect has some manufacturers focusing for now on such transitional products as embedded Internet TV appliances and digital set-top boxes.
Zilog Inc. chairman Ed Sack believes it will be five to seven years before digital TVs catch on in the mass market. "It's going to be a very long process," he said.
"But ultimately, the digital TV will feature an MPEG-2 decoder, a frame buffer and a processor to translate digital video pictures, text and graphics data onto a
screen, with one digital jack in the back of the TV."
Regardless of the video format ultimately chosen by broadcasters, Sack said, the basic building-blocks for digital TV are known, accessible technologies. The real
race, he said, is not to be the first out with a full-blown digital set but to be among the first to adapt the basic platform for such features as bit-mapped on-screen
displays, Web browsing, and data and e-mail retrieval.
Kris Narayan, president and chief executive officer of Telecruz Technology Inc. (Campbell, Calif.), shares that view. Leveraging its 2-D, 3-D and flicker- free
graphics expertise, "chipless" chip company Telecruz designs highly integrated chip sets for TV-based Internet appliances.
"Consumer OEMs today are concerned with intermediary solutions, whether in the form of Internet set-tops or embedded Internet TVs, before moving onto a full
digital TV," Narayan said.
Arsenal assembled
To protect their turf against PC vendors with designs on the digital living room, consumer OEMs are rushing to amass the technologies they will need to build
cost-effective TVs that can display text and graphics at high resolution. They need those solutions today if they are to fend off the PC incursion. Fully digital TV
implementations can wait.
"Graphics are already looking very good" on the Internet set-tops now on the market, Narayan said, but "text is still a problem. Edges of text are blurry." Telecruz's
mission is to improve text display on TV screens, he said.
Full-blown digital TV development may be daunting, but designing transitional products is only slightly less so. The definitions for Internet TV and
graphics/text-friendly TV are still evolving, based on proprietary operating systems and browsers, and no clear winners or standard products are in sight.
Manufacturers of transitional products must settle on a platform (TV, PC, DVD, set-top, telephone or other), application suite, programming language, real- time
operating system and chip set.
When it convenes here this week, the Winter Consumer Electronics Show will underscore the difficulties of wading through the choices.
Products to be displayed on the show floor or currently in development include Sony Corp. and Philips set-tops designed by WebTV Networks (Palo Alto, Calif.);
Internet-surfing boxes by ViewCall America; a Thomson Consumer Electronics set- top devce that's smaller than a VCR and is designed to connect to a standard
color TV-it's based on Oracle Corp. subsidiary Network Computer Inc.'s reference design and NC System Software Suite; the under-$200 InternetBox,
developed by MSU Corp. (Central Milton Keynes, U.K.); Mitsubishi Electric's Diamond TV, a large-screen Internet TV based on Microware's OS-9; and Diba-
designed Internet appliances from several consumer-electronics companies.
Old categories don't fit
According to Thomson officials, the Internet-access device is a comfortable fit with the company's strategy to introduce an all-new category of convergence product
that blends the interactive power of computer technology with the home- entertainment excitement of big-screen color TVs. The NC-based product, priced under
$300, will let consumers use their TVs to surf the Web, send and receive e-mail, complete banking transactions online, shop and perform other interactive ctivities.
Thomson also has become the first consumer-electronics vendor to form an alliance with Compaq Computer Corp. Early this year, the consumer company will
introduce a TV/PC that combines a 36-inch RCA color TV with a full-feature Compaq PC.
The consumer market remains skeptical of such convergence products. Zilog's Sack believes it will be harder to sell PC/TVs than embedded Internet TVs. "When
consumers are told it's a PC, they expect it to perform full-blown PC functionalities, not a subset," he said.
But Microsoft Corp. believes this year will see the converged PC/TV emerge "as a major mass-market phenomenon," said Craig Mundie, senior vice president of
the consumer platforms division.
Mundie recently described Windows CE as an operating system not just for andheld devices but but also for DVDs, Web set-tops, TV-based game machines,
smart phones and automobile PCs.
Microsoft has not disclosed the Windows CE kernel size, memory requirements or real-time operating capability for embedded consumer applications. Mundie
claimed, however, that "a number of consumer-electronics companies are already working on Windows CE-based DVDs and other set-tops."
It's not yet clear whether consumer vendors will embrace Windows CE for set- tops or full-blown digital TVs. "If it's about Microsoft, TV manufacturers will at
least pay attention to the new development," said Sack. "But it's still too early to tell how things will fare."
One certainty is that the flexibility of video formats promised in the U.S. digital TV standard offers PC vendors the opportunity to develop applications based on the
PC platform or a subset and to take a shot at launching a de facto standard before digital TV proliferates on the mass market. That would leave them well-prepared
for its arrival.
CMP Media Inc.
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