Here's the text of Bill Gates' speech at WinHEC '98, March 26........
Someone needs to tell the transcriber that C-CUBE is not spelled "CQ." Scroll to the bottom -- this as good as it gets (except for stock price run-ups).
microsoft.com
<<MR. GATES: Good morning. It's fantastic to see the participation again this year to discuss the future of the PC. It's been an
incredible year for the PC, particularly for customers of PCs. The unit lines continue to go up. We've defined new price points, and
there's an increasing number of scenarios--areas like digital photography that people wouldn't have thought of using a PC before
that we're becoming better and better at handling.>>
*****
<<An area of storage, DVD, is a huge advance, allowing us to have the capacity now to deal with digital video. At first, this will just be
plain back digital video, but, as we'll discuss today, we're going to move on to scenarios where the user gets to manipulate the
digital video, as well. If there's any area I have a concern for the industry about how quickly it's moving, it's in the area of high-speed
connections to the Internet. Although I see very good progress in connecting up businesses at high speeds with reasonable prices,
in order to connect up the homes and have a connection--you don't have to wait for it to be there, and it's very, very fast--the only
product being made is somewhat of an increase in cable modems and ADSL trials.>>
*****
<<Now, one of the scenarios we tackled in Windows 98 is digital television. We include in the programming guides and the ability to
download that by using a broadcast TV schedule. Here there are some really neat things that can be done, and it's a step towards
what we call digital television.
"Digital television" refers to not only having higher quality video, but also having the interactivity, having to access more information.
So let's go ahead and take a look at this. The broadcasting format that we're starting with is called HD 0, and that includes not only
today's interleaf formats, but a high-resolution progressive format, either 480 P60 or 720 P24, and that lets you do movies at very
high quality, and it's quite impressive what that looks like.
This is what we want to have built into every PC, and we've been working with the TV equipment industry and the broadcasters to
explain why, no matter what format the production work is done in, actually transmitting in progressive is a very good approach,
because it's the most efficient way of using the spectrum, and that means whether it's for multiple channels or the data
enhancement, you've got extra capability there that can be used.
So let me ask Steve Guggenheimer, who's the product manager helping drive these capabilities, to come on out and show us what
digital TV looks like.
MR. GUGGENHEIMER: Come on over. Have a seat--a chance to relax.
As you mentioned, digital television has about three key features, and we think that in order to make digital television a reality in
the near term, we have to do two things. We have to enable a high volume of reasonably priced receivers so that consumers go out
and buy the receiving capability, and we need to offer some form of business model or business opportunity for the entire television
industry-- broadcasters, cable, et cetera--so they can recover the cost of moving to a visual infrastructure.
So on the PC side, we're all very familiar with information access, so I brought along the other two things. It does the high-definition
or the HD0 capability, as well as interactive programming.
Now, this particular PC has the hardware in it right now, and is receiving, decoding, and displaying a 480 P or an HD0 level signal,
and it's the PC that's now outputting into this TV as well as the normal screen.
The hardware for this is something that's actually going to come up in the next year. In fact, ATI has said that we can announce
this morning that within the next six months, they plan to try to put on their mainstream graphics chip the ability to receive and
decode the HD0 capability so that mainstream PCs within the PC '99 timeframe will have the hardware capable of supporting this
level of video so consumers can get that.
In terms of the software, I'm running this particular machine on NT 4.0. We're running the same thing next door on Windows 98, and
we're even adding capability into Windows CE so that we can offer consumers a range of receivers, going all the way from the
set-top box form factor all the way up to the work station form factor. So in terms of enabling a high volume of receivers, this type of
capability will be available on a large number of receivers of all form factors within the next year.
Now, let's talk a little bit about interactivity. You'll notice in the lower left-hand corner, I have an I. So as a consumer, if I wanted, I
can simply ignore it, or, if I'm interested, I can go ahead and bring up the tool box.
So now what I can do is I can take the broad reach medium of television and combine it with direct interactivity of the Internet. So
now as a consumer, if I want statistics, I can simply click on statistics, and they come up when I want them, versus the
broadcaster sending them to me before every commercial.
Going back to the toolbar, another interesting model is replay. So as a consumer now, if I want a replay, I can get the replay once, I
can watch it over and over again, I can come back to it later in the game. And if you think about it, that requires storage, another
common component of the PCs that we're all familiar with.
Now, in both of these areas, you'll notice that there was advertising associated with this, so in terms of a business opportunity,
there's the opportunity for more or new forms of advertising, and that's very familiar to broadcasters.
However, in addition, there's other things. For example, transactions. In this case, I could buy a jersey associated with this game.
Or, if you were watching a television ad, you could be watching an ad for CD-ROM and go all the way from watching it to purchasing
it. So it gives both the broadcasters and the advertisers and the community the opportunity to move from just a push media all to a
full medium or to transactions.
The last on I want to show you in terms of being a little bit creative. You talk a little bit about potentially having multi-channels.
Well, what about a subscription program that says the television program, the football game is free, but for an extra 50 cents a
month, I can get a second camera angle. This has enough bandwidth to support two complete pictures. I could get the one camera
angle for free and then for an extra 50 cents get a second camera angle, or I could get the local commentator instead of the
national commentator.
So what I wanted to show and what we've done is basically that we will be enabling digital TV capabilities on a broad range of
receivers, ranging from the PCs down to set-top boxes over the next year and, as you can see, it's quite a nice thing, and I'll go
ahead and just hit B to demonstrate. It's on the PC.
C-CUBE!!!!!!!
MR. GATES: What we saw there was watching high-definition video and being able to interact with it. Another scenario that we
think is very important is actually letting people create their own high-quality video--to be able to do editing right there on the PC. So
in the same way that we see still photos and keeping albums of those, mailing them around--we see that as being popular--we'd
also like to bring in a motion video.
Well, there's a very tricky element here, which is that motion video requires very high data rates and in order to deal with it at all,
you have to have real-time compression, real-time encoding into one of these compressed formats, and that hasn't been possible in
the past. In fact, it's only been with very, very expensive workstations that people have been able to do that.
Now, through the miracle of technology, we can see that that can become a future of the PC, so real-time digital recording. I'd ask
Peter Biddle to come out and show us how this is going to work, how we're going to get video in as a first-class data type.
MR. BIDDLE: Thanks a lot.
Okay. What I have here for a demo is I have a Toshiba laptop and it's in a docking station, and inside the docking station is this
new chip from CQ--it's an MPEG 2 encoder/decoder chip, and plugged into that chip, we have an actual video feed from one of the
cameras back there. We also have a Pioneer DVR drive connected to this system.
And what I actually just did is when you were over there on the couch, I took a feed from that video camera, and we should be able
to see this come up on screen. So what you're seeing on the screen is MPEG 2 data that we real-time encoded using this chip
onto the hard drive without playing it back, and this happens real-time.
MR. GATES: We're even adding capability in the Windows CE.
MR. BIDDLE: In the audio.
MR. GATES: Yes.
MR. BIDDLE: Okay. So not only can this chip encode, it can also decode, and it can decode two simultaneous streams. That has
some sort of immediate ramification for end users, that the first one we want to demo is playback with two streams at the same
time. And here we go.
So what we're seeing right here is that video once again, but I'm going to add "Michael Collins" from Warner Brothers. We're going
to stick that in the mix. And, as I said, because we're doing two streams at the same time on the system, we can start doing per
pixel transitions between the two, so you're going to see here is a set of programmable phase wipes and other transitions that are
only capable if you're capable of doing two streams at the exact same time. We're not switching sources, we're actually decoding
both streams simultaneously.
And this also has interesting sort of repercussion with picture-in-picture, where HDTV has, you know, very immediate benefits
there, as does single-click recoding in an electronic programming guide on like a Web TV or a broadcast PC. You could go away
for the weekend and stack up all your shows and digitally record them.
A system with this level of functionality would have cost about $100,000 a year ago, probably well over that, and this is
going to debut at consumer price points, but what's really interesting is that we also have a DVR drive on the system.
So just to review, we took the signal, we MPEG 2 video encoded it, we MPEG 2 stereo audio encoded it, we put it down on the
hard drive. Then I ran a program that turned it into DVD video format, and then we copied it down. So I'm going to pop the DVR into
the system here.
So you can see this disk right here, here it is. And, as I said, we went from end to end here, and let's take a look at what happens.
This is a consumer DVD video player, so we take the disk, we put it into the consumer DVD video player, and here's an act of faith.
So what did we just do? In four minutes, we went from nothing, analog capture, MPEG 2, onto the hard drive, turned it into DVD
video and burned it on a DVDR disk, put in a DVD video player and played it back.
MR. GATES: I'm certainly surprised to see that CQ is getting that chip out and getting it out at very low price points. So this is one
capability that's going to actually appear faster than we would have expected.
Well, for Microsoft, this is a very big year. In fact, this is the first year where we've had two major activities in the Windows product
line. By mid-year, getting Windows 98 out and also, about the same time, getting the second major beta of NT 5.0.
And those products represent a massive amount of work, many of which are realizing initiatives driven by this Windows tech forum.
For example, getting in the new device-driver architecture, the WDM architecture. Windows 98 and NT5 implement that
architecture, and that's going to allow people to do things with real-time audio and video and not have to kludge around the
operating system when they want to get those capabilities. We're very exciting about getting that foundation in.
That's also the place that we get into to rich manageability capabilities built into the operating system, so that's a big step forward
for all of us.>> |
