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To: BillyG who wrote (35780)	9/9/1998 3:49:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Broadcasters don't have the equipment for HDTV. The zero billion market.................................. Digital television awaits programming tools 7:51 p.m. ET (2353 GMT) September 8, 1998 SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) - Broadcasters getting ready to take their digital signals live might envy the advantages Sid Caesar had in the heady days of live television. Those were the days when a performer's every miscue was beamed into living rooms across America. As co-host of "Your Show of Shows,'' Caesar was known - even loved - for his television slip-ups. The rubbery comedian fumbled lines and stumbled onto sets. Doors often didn't work, and sometimes scenery collapsed. Instead of lamenting the glitches, Caesar used his wit to exploit the mistakes. Most viewers thought it was part of his schtick. The 26 broadcasters scheduled to go digital in November won't have that luxury. They will have to live up to promises television audiences have heard for nearly a decade: beautiful, movie-theater-quality pictures and sound, more programming choices, and access to a new set of digital services. The rich pictures and expanded services are supposed to whet consumer appetites for a new generation of television sets-boxes that initially will cost from $2,800 to $8,000 - and get them to send their analog sets to the scrap heap. But US broadcasters may have bitten off more bandwidth than they can chew. Stations are having to build new studios from scratch and either create new material or convert existing material for digital broadcast - and without the essential tools. Much of the technology needed to produce digital television has yet to be invented. Broadcasters are having to develop video editing and titling equipment, special effects instruments, and playback machines as they go along. Analog equipment is fully mature and easily replaceable. Broadcasters have backup systems, so audiences rarely have to stand by while engineers overcome technical difficulties. There are no such safety nets for digital television. The first runs won't be pretty, and broadcasters know it. "You could have a broadcaster that goes off the air for an hour,'' says Craig Tanner, executive director of the Advanced Television Systems Committee, the authoring body of the digital television standard in the United States, Canada, South Korea, and Taiwan. "This could happen a lot in the early days of digital television.'' The debut of digital television is the ultimate high-wire act of the digital age. Broadcasters won't be able to joke their way through when a picture goes fuzzy. Audiences will not accept losing a signal as part of the show. It all comes down to eyeballs, and there won't be that many watching when digital television first clicks on. "There's a zero billion dollar marketplace out there,'' Tanner says. "So how much are broadcasters willing to invest up front for the first thousand viewers?'' more.............................. foxnews.com