Firms grapple for shares in TV's future sets, content As digital technology advances, user products have become specialised
BENJAMIN FULFORD
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10/28/97
South China Morning Post
Page 7
(Copyright 1997)
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Ready or not, here comes digital TV. United States computer giants, media conglomerates and electronics manufacturers are engaged in a multi-billion dollar war for control of the screen in your living room and office. All may emerge winners in this war.
Your living room screen eventually should, thanks to digital technology, provide any programme you want, any time on a large, crystal-clear screen with picture quality that, in some ways such as colour vividness, is better than reality.
The battle for this future living room viewer often centres on obscure technical standards such as what kind of laser will be used to read a digital video disk.
The rewards for the victors will be a market likely to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide by early next century.
The conflict has its origins in the late 1980s when the US was in mortal terror of the Japanese threat to dominate the next generation of world broadcasting with its analogue high definition television.
A US industry-government group sought to prevent Japan from setting the world standard by leap-frogging straight into digital high definition broadcasting.
However, regulators in both Japan and the US were chasing a fast-moving technological target.
Japan's analogue technology now has become irrelevant, while digital broadcast technology has become so flexible regulators have decided they can let markets decide what the broadcast standard of the future will be.
Today's battle has moved to a new stage. On one side can be found Microsoft and Intel, or Wintel. Their dream is of a screen containing a version of Windows 2000x, running on whatever Intel chip is being made then, channeling viewers to infotainment content largely controlled by Microsoft and its allies.
Broadcasters, for their part, who will have to invest billions in digital broadcasting equipment, want to continue the existing format of television but with more channels and enhanced picture quality.
The electronics manufacturers, mostly Japanese, only want to ensure the high-quality picture screen is theirs as is the digital brain that controls it and the broadcasting equipment which sends it.
Japanese television manufacturers are confident their superior technology will allow them to win this battle.
A top official at Matsushita Electric Industrial Co said: "The big screen used for entertainment will continue to be different from a smaller, desktop screen used for work and information gathering because they are used in fundamentally different ways."
Whatever the outcome of the battle may be, the first stage already is there for us to see. Digital broadcasting has begun in Britain and in Japan.
In both cases, satellites are being used to send dozens of channels of standard quality TV using 20 per cent of the bandwidth analogue television requires. Set-top boxes, made by Japanese companies such as Matsushita, are being used to decode the signals.
The success of digital broadcasting in Britain has stemmed largely from its ability to broadcast plenty of sports, notably all soccer games being played, rather than a select few. Also popular are movies, childrens' programmes and news services.
In Japan, digital broadcasting started last autumn with the arrival of Perfect TV, offering 88 channels with content ranging from sports and cartoons to pornography.
In December, DirectTV Japan will broadcast 91 channels and, by next spring, Rupert Murdoch will enter the arena with Japan Sky Broadcasting Co (JSkyB), bringing the total number of channels to more than 300.
The big worry among broadcasters is with this many channels, it will simply amount to taking the same pie and cutting it into many small pieces. "It is doubtful that 300 channels can co-exist," Katsuji Ebisawa, president of the Japan state-owned NHK television, said.
The US is due to begin digital broadcasting next year, and a fight already is emerging over whether to use the new digital technology to send a few high-definition channels or lots of low-quality channels.
In any case, for the next few years, digital television would amount to a continuation of the existing type of television where viewers waited for programmes to be broadcast, analysts said.
There may be more specialised programmes and the picture quality will soon be much better, but content will be controlled largely by traditional broadcasters and the screens and set-top boxes will remain largely in the hands of Japanese electronics manufacturers.
The next step in the battle will be determined by developments in two main areas: memory and bandwidth. Increased bandwidth will allow viewers to download quickly a movie or programme into the computer or TV and watch it when they want.
Memory will be needed to store this programme.
The fibre-optic technology needed for bandwidth is well developed but it will take many years and possibly trillions of dollars to replace all of the copper wires now going into people's houses with fibre-optic cables.
New memory technology is, for the moment, boiling down to a race to see who can develop the first practical blue semi-conductor laser.
A blue laser is needed because it has a narrow bandwidth of 400-450 nanometres, compared with the 630 to 650 nanometres of the red lasers in todays' digital video disks (DVD).
That difference in bandwidth is whether a disk, like today's DVDs, can hold 4.7 gigabytes of information per side or 15 GB. A total of 15 GB is enough to hold a high-definition, full-length movie on a single disk.
Several Japanese companies have announced success with experimental blue lasers.
With 15 GB rewritable discs and proper bandwidth, viewers will be able to download and watch whatever programme they want, whenever they want to watch it.
This is where Microsoft hopes consumers will use a future version of their software, powered by an Intel brain, to select the content which viewers download from the Internet.
It seems most likely that with globalisation increasing the international division of labour, that future television will have something for all of todays' contestants.
Viewers will watch content largely created by the present media and movie companies on screens created by Japanese electronics firms and use United States computer technology as an "intelligent TV guide" to select programmes. |
