One process stops, another starts

Last month’s Federal Communications Commission announcement of a Grand Alliance between the four remaining competitive high-definition television (HDTV) systems for a single, digital system signaled to Advisory Committee Chairman Richard Wiley, who had shepherded the negotiations for such a standard since 1987, that the process is finally concluding. Others, such as Mike Liebhold of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, believe that this is just the end of the beginning.

Liebhold is probably right. The FCC Advisory Committee was set up when there was only one HDTV proposed standard: the hybrid analog-digital Muse system proposed by NHK and Sony. Even when General Instrument’s fully digital DigiCipher compression system was proposed at the very last minute, the focus of the committee, system proponents and manufacturers was on a standard for traditional broadcast transmission. Those who wished to include other video issues such as the computer and photography industries were not taken very seriously.

These groups were able ultimately to resurrect a subcommittee of the Advisory Committee as a forum to present issues such as the computer industry’s desires to have entire picture frames transmitted sequentially to reduce flicker (called progressive scan) as the preferred transfer mode or to replace NTSC’s and PAL’s oval pixels with square ones, where the dots are arranged in equally spaced rows and columns for easier transmission, manipulation and storage.

As time went on it became clear that the computer industry arguments were technically compelling. The grand alliance agreed to progressive scan and square pixels but allowed interleaving (the present method of sending frames at 30 frames per second) as a transition technology. Technical details such as how to obtain a “prioritized, packetized, data transport structure,” as the FCC press release put it, using such techniques as the SMPTE header/descriptor (see Vol. 2, No. 5, p. 19), or how to integrate whatever comes from the Alliance with regard to compression systems, MPEG-2 international services and requirements standards have all been left for later discussion and decision.

All this is quite important because these discussions are not about an HDTV broadcast standard any longer. They are about how one defines and uses high-bandwidth data streams in an interoperable, scalable and open architecture — whether those data streams come over the air or through coax, fiber-optic or copper cabling.

As John Sculley of Apple pointed out to the National Association of Broadcasting Convention, “in a digital world there’s no distinction between high-definition video and audio, text, graphics or animation — they’re all data types. They can be stored, indexed and interacted with as though they were the same data type.”

EACH BROADCASTER CAN BE ‘A LITTLE FCC’

At a hearing called soon after the FCC announcement by a House Energy subcommittee, Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab expanded upon Sculley’s analysis by arguing that each broadcaster could be like a little FCC choosing what to put out over his 6-MHz channel with a potential radius of 100 miles. He or she could send out four compressed NTSC channels. Or send out just one and use the rest of the capacity for high-bandwidth data transfers for commercial use. Or provide interactive entertainment or real high-definition pay-per-view on weekends. It would be up to each individual’s discretion.

John Abel, executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), agreed emphatically. “We are not discussing HDTV, we are discussing economic use of bandwidth. And the broadcast spectrum has wide bandwidth available now with little cost for use in the National Infrastructure Initiatives (NII), as opposed to the cable and telephone companies who talk about this so much. Broadcasters will have to be freed to offer such new services over their spectrum, but many stand ready to do so soon.”

Why is the broadcast industry making this strategic switch from broadcast-only to sophisticated bandwidth supplier? The old ways are changing and they know it. Cable TV has penetrated 60 percent of the homes in the United States. Local broadcasters are, for the most part, merely broadcasting material they have obtained from the networks or syndicates. Cable operators themselves own a large amount of that material and are obtaining more (Encore and MCA deals, among others), and cable companies are obtaining programming directly from networks (for example, TCI and Fox) without any requirement to pay the local broadcaster for its use.

The broadcast industry is a saturated, slow-growth industry. It must find more valuable uses for its assets. Its major asset, spectrum allocation, could be worth much more if used for data and wireless communications. For non-network stations, the Aspen Institute in the mid-’80s estimated that use of broadcast spectrum for digital data and wireless would generate 10 times as much revenue as traditional broadcast activity.

WHAT MUST BE DONE TO MOVE FORWARD?

If it is indeed the end of the beginning of broadcast TV as we know it — all major participants are agreed that a new, high-bandwidth digital system can be developed and implemented — what more needs to be done? A great deal.

• The compromise allowing interleaving in the short term may mean millions, indeed billions, are spent on an interim and obsolete system. The MIT groups involved in the Grand Alliance noted in a footnote their objection to interleaving.

• Many other technical details need addressing, and equally important to the equation is who addresses them. More than just the present members of the advisory committee, shouldn’t all stakeholders be given the opportunity to participate? Doesn’t this require a new Advisory Committee that can insure a truly independent process?

Apple’s Liebhold was the most intense about this issue before the subcommittee. He argues that such stakeholders as the educational media and computing industries, the medical image communications community, electronic publishing, business image and page graphics organizations, scientific visualization and defense and many others who use these technical applications must be fully heard and their concerns integrated if this digital system is truly to be interoperable and extensible to the widest audience.

• Where is the digital equipment? The broadcast industry wants interlace as an interim because it does not see where the fully digital progressive scan production and transmission equipment will come from. This is a concern. There is such equipment. But as Robert Cohen of the Economic Strategy Institute said, “Such gear as digital cameras exist, but they exist in the black (i.e., within the intelligence community). They must be allowed to come out into the light.”

• MIT’s Negroponte was roundly criticized at the Markey hearing for his emphasis on the need for international standards coordination. Many think this is just a means to slow down the process and allow the Japanese time to catch up. Others think that the open discussions that have been occurring between the digital system proponents and the MPEG-2 standards committees should handle most issues.

But if we are opening our process to more American stakeholders, perhaps we should encourage more openness to the international community as well. The Japanese are not standing still. In February they announced the formation of an Advanced Pictorial Technology Development and Promotion Project whose aim is to research and develop an ultra-sensitive digital TV system that works to 2,000-line definition by the year 2005.

A graceful bow. At the time, this UDTV project was seen as a graceful way for the Japanese to bow out of the present standards process. But given the Grand Alliance and further developments, some discussion with the UDTV group seems appropriate.

This may be the beginning of the end, but the end is a long way off. Testing will not be completed for a year. Products using the agreed-upon digital HDTV system will take more than a year beyond that; it seems reasonable that we’ll wait three to five years before real digital video productions, and HD equipment to view them on, are readily available. In fact, that may even be optimistic. Many companies, most notably the cable and telcos in their interactive TV projects, will be providing digital products using MPEG-2 chips and the like long before that.

Tom Hargadon