February 23, 1998
TV Cable-Box Software May Blur Digital Signals
By JOEL BRINKLEY
For more than a year, Microsoft Corp. has been cajoling the nation's television broadcasters into abandoning high-definition television and using only the computer industry's favored, lower-resolution transmission formats when digital broadcasts begin in the fall.
At issue in this argument is how the digital cable boxes will handle the high-definition signals that broadcasters in the nation's 10 largest cities plan to put on the air starting in six or eight months.
By and large, broadcasters have rejected these entreaties. Now, however, Microsoft appears to have gained at least a small foothold for its proposal through a little-noticed feature of the company's agreement to supply the operating system for several million digital cable boxes being purchased by Tele-Communications Inc. And that has angered broadcasters, television set makers, government officials and others.
Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association, complained during a broadcasters' convention last month: "TCI's 14 million customers may never have a chance to see HDTV. This is a huge tragedy for the American consumer."
Leo Hindery Jr., president of Tele-Communications, replied that the association's "information is incorrect, and it was extremely irresponsible for them to mislead the public."
At issue in this argument is how the digital cable boxes will handle the high-definition signals that broadcasters in the nation's 10 largest cities plan to put on the air starting in six or eight months. Microsoft and its partners in the computer industry have been urging broadcasters to use only lower-resolution digital signals that are transmitted in the "progressive" format.
Microsoft and some other computer companies oppose full high-definition broadcasts because they do not want to pay for the extra memory and other components that would be needed to receive HDTV signals on personal computers. And they favor progressive transmissions because that format handles text and computer graphics with much greater clarity than the competing "interlaced" format.
After the arrangement with TCI was announced, Craig Mundie, a senior vice president for Microsoft, said of Microsoft's proposal, code-named HD-0: "The cable industry now has a proxy in digital TV. The HD-0 formats are more relevant now than ever before."
The CBS television network and some other broadcasters have announced that they will broadcast the highest-resolution HDTV signals in the interlaced format, the one preferred by many people in the television industry. As a result, CBS denounced the Tele-Communications-Microsoft arrangement, which was announced last month. In addition, Sony Electronics Corp. and others including Susan Ness, a Federal Communications Commission member, and the National Association of Broadcasters have raised questions or complaints.
Tele-Communications' new digital cable boxes are intended primarily for use with conventional televisions, not the new digital models that will go on sale in the fall. The boxes will allow the company to offer dozens of additional channels by using digital compression to squeeze as many as 12 digital channels into the space occupied by one conventional analog channel.
In addition, when digital television broadcasts begin, Windows CE, the Microsoft operating system that is to be built into the boxes, will convert those programs for display on analog sets - but only if they are broadcast in the lower-resolution progressive format set out in the computer industry's proposal.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related Article
The First High-Definition TV Sets Debut
(January 12, 1998)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
For the high-definition signals that CBS and other broadcasters plan to air, "the display would likely show white snow," a statement from Tele-Communications says. To accommodate those complex signals, the company says, additional memory and processing speed would have to be built into the boxes, raising the cost.
There is a second element to the debate. What will the boxes offer people who buy the expensive new high-definition television sets?
Tele-Communications says it is making provisions for them. "Our philosophy is that there aren't going to be many high-definition sets sold this year," said David Beddow, a senior vice president for Tele-Communications. "But for those people, our box will demodulate and de-encrypt the high-definition signal and pass it through to the HDTV." That means a consumer would have to run a second cable from the box to the digital input on the HDTV set.
But Shapiro said that solution was inadequate because he feared that Hollywood, ever concerned about the threat of piracy, would object to giving consumers access to de-encrypted digital, high-definition movies. "And I don't think they will consider this a minor problem," he said.
The issue is especially acute for cable movies. Once digital television broadcasts begin, the public will, of course, have unrestricted access to digital, high-definition movies that are broadcast over the air. But by the time a movie appears on regular television, it is near the end of its profit-making life.
But that is not the case for pay-per-view movies or others that are carried on premium services like HBO, which has announced that it will transmit two channels of high-definition programming starting this summer. The digital cable boxes are still being designed, and the opportunity remains to respond to these complaints, though Tele-Communications has not announced any plans to do so.
Still, the company told Ness, the FCC commissioner, "At this point, the boxes are not configured to translate HDTV signals" in the full-resolution, interlaced format, "though that remains an alternative should the marketplace move in that direction."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related Sites
Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned in this article. These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability. When you have finished visiting any of these sites, you will be able to return to this page by clicking on your Web browser's "Back" button or icon until this page reappears.
Microsoft
Tele-Communications Inc.
Consumers Electronics Manufacturers Association
Home | Sections | Contents | Search | Forums | Help
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company |
