Bringing new technology to consumer markets

The big news coming out of the consumer electronics industry is not that the entire spectrum of home entertainment products are becoming digital — that is no big surprise. What is encouraging, is that these companies are looking to cooperate with other interests from the entertainment and computer industry.

A number of new products and technologies will be during over the next nine months in the consumer electronics and home entertainment markets.

Digital VCRs. Digital video recorders should roll out of Japan and into consumer markets sometime in 1993.

The manufacturers — Sony, Matsushita, et al. — are determined to retain existing “high-end” VCR special effects and editing functions in these devices. Therefore, these new VCRs will use a compression scheme that compresses and decompresses each frame individually — unlike mpeg and its ilk. As a consequence, they will not compress data all that much, which is not a problem when recording to tape.

One benefit of this approach is that the image quality should be appreciably higher than that which can be achieved with a routine such as mpeg, which sacrifices image quality for much higher compression ratios. In fact, the digital image quality should be better than both the s-vhs and Hi-8mm formats.

CableLabs target is approaching. With CableLabs planning to select a video compression scheme by November, Dick Green, CableLabs’ president, believes that the cable industry will be able to send digital signals directly to the home within two years.

The economic incentive is to pick a scheme that will allow up to 10 channels of compressed digital video to be transmitted in the same bandwidth currently required to carry a single analog channel. If the company is to achieve this, the scheme it chooses should also work for delivering a single channel of video over twisted-pair phone lines, and it might even work for recording full-motion video on current-generation CDs.

Here’s where it gets interesting. CableLabs and the Japanese consumer electronics companies have been cooperating to insure that the new digital VCRs will be able to record digital cable broadcasts. The most likely solution will be to build into the recorders the capability to bypass the “native” compression routine and record all 10 channels of compressed cable data directly onto tape.

The cable decompression/decoder box, wired between the VCR and the TV set, could then be used to select one of the 10 channels, decompress it, and feed the signal to the TV.

From all indications, this should be the first of many cooperative, international efforts to take hold in the home entertainment and information arena.

Jonathan Seybold