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To: J R KARY who wrote (3637)	8/2/1998 4:34:00 PM
From: art slott	Respond to of 8218

There's more to Digital TV than meets the eye By Peter Coffee, PC Week Online July 29, 1998 In the next 18 months, digital television will transform our major means of one-to-many communication. And the process will be much faster than previous transitions, such as the move to color TV or the introduction of the audio compact disc. The name "DTV" may mislead many people into thinking this isn't an IT issue. Don't think of DTV as merely a better kind of television service. Think of it as a means of delivering 19M bps to millions of customers. DTV is not just one kind of service but a whole portfolio of services with huge implications for how we think about education, entertainment and electronic commerce. This week, I had a chance to bring together several important perspectives on DTV when I moderated a panel discussion at the Herring on Hollywood conference. Held in Santa Monica, Calif., by Herring Communications, the conference attracted every kind of institution, from Playboy Enterprises to the Federal Communications Commission. My panel included Robert Pepper, chief of the FCC's Office of Plans and Policy; John Hollar, executive vice president of PBS Learning Ventures; Doug Seserman of TCI Digital Cable; and Kevin Wall, president and CEO of BoxTop, an iXL company that consults with broadcasters on devising presentation and navigation tools for interactive services. The panel agreed that the different elements of DTV are coming together quickly. Broadcasters, Pepper said, are ahead of schedule in preparing digital services to use the new spectrum space that's been allocated for that purpose. By November, more than two dozen U.S. television stations will be offering DTV programs; by November of 1999, more than half of all U.S. households will have access to at least three DTV channels. PBS plans major entertainment events to launch digital service in major metropolitan areas, beginning late this year, and it also sees important data delivery opportunities. BoxTop finds local media outlets aggressively interested in exploring value-added options that combine entertainment with interactive retail, while TCI sees extensive digital service packages adding only $10 or so to monthly cable rates. It's vital to understand that DTV is not just movie-quality pictures and CD-quality sound. To begin with, more than a million bits per second out of the aggregate DTV bit stream will be reserved for non-TV applications such as data delivery. There are also opportunities for "opportunistic data," in the words of Judson French, director of DTV at Harris Corp. It will be possible to tuck data into the empty spaces when TV programs aren't using all their available bandwidth and to use this as a means of delivering data that doesn't have tight real-time requirements. None of this could be happening without the tremendous work that's been done lately in data-compression techniques. Standards such as MPEG-2 incorporate extensive research into how the human eye and brain cooperate in seeing, and these compression techniques are subtly ruthless in discarding information that the eye/brain system won't miss. It seems to me that DTV, with its crucial reliance on MPEG and similar technologies, marks a turning point in digital systems. Forget whatever you've heard or thought about impersonal IT forcing users to think like computers. As the power of IT is increasingly harnessed by rich media, the action will increasingly be driven by those who know what people like. As Herring CEO Anthony Perkins observed during the wrap-up session late Tuesday afternoon: There are many Internet startups, but there's only one Bugs Bunny. Companies that own distinctive content may not have won the game already, but the game is theirs to lose. The challenge to Hollywood is to recognize the broadening scope of the competition for people's attention. That same challenge faces corporate IT professionals as they look to DTV, not just as an entertainment medium, but as a flexible, high-capacity data delivery tool. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Digital enhanced tv is the next big thing. Paul Allen thinks so. See the Actv thread for that story. Regards, Art

To: J R KARY who wrote (3637)	8/2/1998 5:42:00 PM
From: Robert Scott Diver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8218

Jim, XEON was delayed twice for design bugs. IMO neither the DEC or the INTEL designs for highly complex new processors will be bug free in the currently planned time frames. Compilers needed to take full advantage of the new processors will lag introduction of the HW. IBM has been using techniques similar to those discussed for years and, I hope, has patented key inventions. This expertise, coupled with IBM's chip world class chip manufacturing capability should drive future earnings. Wouldn't it be nice if INTEL & Microsoft had to license key processor and compiler technology from Big Blue? Scott