Ed's View - The Demise of Broadcasting

[Robz]

According to the ATSC-MH-RFP_rev1.doc, (a request for proposal) one of the questions that the responder must answer is:

[wgw11232]

I hope we don't loose OTA HDTV. As a 75 year old my world has changed almost more than I can bear. I can remember when AM was all we had and it was great until pressure from other age groups made it what it is today--garbage. The same for FM, except for Public Radio and a local station playing Jazz and Big Band the rest is mostly--garbage. Other folks now want Gay Pride parades etc and I find that disgusting --garbage. And do you think I can find a church in my city which still uses an organ and piano and traditional hymns and is not pushing the gay agenda? No--I have found a church where the preaching is good so we go 30 minutes late to catch the sermon, the music--garbage. I had a satelite once but I could only watch 5 or 6 of the 150 channels because other age groups demanded sex,profanity and pointless/disgusting advertising. Then came the day I had to deal with 5 levels of customer service which still couldn't solve a technical problem so the sat went in the--garbage. Thank goodness for OTA PBS, excellent programing and free except for our support donation. Were OTA broadcasting taken away my antenna and tv would go to the--garbage. Then we would get to know many more neighbors and sit around on the porch in the evening enjoying each other! I really do hope that other age groups or marketing gurus do not change my world any further by screwing up whats left.

Bill Wood

[Dale]

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) was outraged when one of the ABC king pins said at a Paul Kagan conference in NYC back in 1991 that ABC would explore multiple uses of the 6MHz digital channel that may not include HDTV. McCain, like many people, had misread the original intent of broadcasting as layed out in a petitiion to the FCC. Why was the birth of HDTV to come through the terrestrial broadcasters in the first place? It could have technically been launched by satellite and/or cable first, leaving broadcasters completely out of the picture.

That fear of being left out gave rise to the now-famous 1987 petition to the FCC signed by 57 broadcast groups requesting a freeze on spectrum allotments until the challenging question about HDTV transmission was fully answered. The petition contained no promise by broadcasters to drive the HDTV market or even did it suggest that they would cause it to happen. (As it turned out they did contribute the most to the birth of HD.)

HDTV was clearly seen by leading communications executives as something appealing to the national appetite, though certain to be laborious in its coming. If it took off in cable or satellite or both and broadcasting was not a part of it, the fifth estate was sure to be toast. The argument heard from the the NAB in 1987 was that the nation must have free-over-the-air television for news and analysis as an essential servant to democracy. The public, they said, should not be forced to pay cable for it. If the broadcasting business collapsed from an abandoment of viewers the most vulnerable in our society would be disenfranchised. Nowhere in the petition did it say that broadcasters were out to advance the state-of-the-art in some public service way nor did it suggest that they are in a work to bring to the public HDTV. What the petition said is that broadcasting is a national treasure and an essential part of the democratic process and should not be driven out of business by a foreign technical marvel better fitted to come sooner than later by way of a pay cable or satellite service. They had to have enough spectrum and a standard.

There never had been anything prohibiting cable from plunging in at any time to drive it other than they too were not ready and needed to be coordinated with the technology broadcasting would adopt. The most important people in television set making believed that it would take the credibility of broadcasting to convince the American people that HDTV was for real. Cable didn't have the stature to carry it alone. Broadcasting had to do it and it was the lobbying of this point by the manufacturers that had Senator McCain rising up to say that the government was duped by broadcasters who said they needed spectrum for HDTV and now they want to use it for multicasting..



A litttle more background:
The FCC assigned the task of answering the technical questions leading to a new standard to a committee headed by former FCC Chairman, Richard E. Wiley, himself a washington attorney with a budding K Street practice. Wiley formed the ACATS (Advisory Committee for Advanced Television Services) bringing in as his board a blue ribbon group of top CEOs hailing from all parts of broadcasting, cable, satellite, and their suppliers. After nine years of development the standard was set (December of 1986) and the rules of engagement were written by the FCC and commented upon. In the course of the development it became clear that digital telecasting was possible and with that advent came a new set of circumstances -- fragmentation of the signal for a variety of services was now possible. One no longer need to devote all of the 6MHz signal19.3 Mb/s to HDTV. The ATSC standard for picture quality to accomdate new possibilities then extended from 480i to 1080i, It was determined that in the 19.3 Mb/s would support a single HDTV program or several of a lesser quality.

In the course of events leading to the standard there had been serious discussions about mobile reception. At that time our environment was less likely to engage mobile television services. It was not until recently that the idea of handhelds become the talk of the town. The ATSC is now busy developing a standard for doing that (as noted by other posters)

If a point is to be found in all of this it is that the broadcasting industry will do with its spectrum what the law permits and business dictates. If the business dictates that it be a prime time four hours of HD and 20 hours of SDTV in all its variations, then that is how it will be. If it turns out that even during prime time an SDTV multichannel handheld or other use provides the better business proposition, there is nothing in the law today to prohibit that. I will note that there are broadcasters with a public servant's heart and then there are broadcasters who see it only as a money pump. Looking ten years ahead the outlook is mixed but it is still quite predictable that some of the TV stations will be operating much as they do today and even more predictable that others will be entirely unrecognizable from what they are today.

[Dale]

It (HDTV) just will not be distributed via their OTA spectrum and will not have to be compromised by it.

I'm very confused by this article. I fail to understand how OTA HDTV would be quality-compromised. From, what I've seen so far, it seems like cable and satellite systems are the ones compromising HD quality by overly aggressive compression in the interests of cramming more channels into the pipeline. Unless OTA broadcasters try to put HD and multiple SD channels in their 6 MHz, OTA HD should be as good as it gets.

And who the heck is interested in viewing HD on mobile/handheld devices?

Broadcasting has just as many ways to degrade an image as do any of the multichannel providers. It is all in bit allocation. So far a single broadcast channel going digital usually has no other business venture as yet tosupport nor do they carry other channels, like satellite or cable do. So, they have not had any reason to degrade the image by lowering bit allocation and assigning the saved bits to another of their services. But the point of Ed's article is that the day is coming when the business dictates that the signal will be chopped up to make numerous sub-channels, some for mobile or handheld applications. Yes, there is no reason to have full HDTV on a handheld.

[Rodolfo]

I believe that although is easy to assume that mobile services using the 6MHz bandwidth of a HDTV channel could potentially degrade the quality of a good HD signal that is already broadcasting at the full 19.4 Mbps, it is also possible that the mobile transmission version of a given channel use the bandwidth of other alternative local broadcasting channels to whom the FCC has given 6 MHz and are not actually using the entire bandwidth for what they are broadcasting (for example, a single SD channel that only uses 3-4 Mbps).

In other words, it might not be a demise of broadcasting HD if the allocation of mobile signals is done wisely, but the risk exists if not done properly.

I covered this subject in August this year on this series of articles:

http://www.hdtvmagazine.com/articles/20 ... system.php

The analysis of how to do the allocation I mention above is toward the end of the series.

Best Regards,

Rodolfo La Maestra