Europeans give up on hybrid high-definition TV standard

The European attempt at a high-definition television standard, known as HD MAC, is basically dead. Fueled by more than a billion dollars of funding from the European Community (EC), the effort by Thomson and Philips was a mixed analog/digital system that was being pushed as an alternative to the NHK/Sony MUSE system from Japan and the various digital standards being tested in the United States.

The standard never showed any advantages over the NHK/Sony system and was considered outmoded by those who felt that any new standard had to be digital (see Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 13).

THE MONEY’S ALL GONE

In early December, the EC refused to accept HD MAC as its preferred standard and put Thomson and Philips on notice that funds would not be forthcoming for major development. The French and Dutch firms made strenuous efforts to show that HD MAC was a system that could be implemented and deserved continued support.

At a February conference in Luxembourg, called “HDTV in the Marketplace; the Commercial Opportunities,” speakers from both Thomson and Philips were under constant attack from United Kingdom, Germany and Astra (the EC’s advanced TV consortium) delegates. It became clear that the HD MAC standard had very little backing from technical experts in other countries.

Moving forward to digital. On the last day of the conference, it was learned that the relevant EC funding committees had held an emergency meeting and voted 11-1 to withdraw funding from HD MAC developments. (Other EC HDTV efforts, Race and Eureka, continue to receive some funding.) The EC decision is to move forward with digital video standards development.

Richard Solomon, project manager of DARPA’s Advanced Imaging program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and keynote speaker at the Luxembourg conference, applauded this decision, but noted that Europe is at least two years behind the United States in digital video standards.

PARTNERS IN SETTING STANDARDS

The Europeans do not want to give either the Japanese or the Americans any advantages. They would like to be considered as partners in setting any new video standards.

Political leaders seem to assume that whoever sets a standard has a head start in implementing that standard. So, the pressure persists for independent implementations in Japan, the U.S. and Europe.

What U.S. partisans of digital video hope is that any standard is open and extensible, so other standards can be developed over time and integrated into a coherent system that allows all standards to coexist. The Europeans and the Japanese could thus accept a U.S.-designated digital video standard for the near term while working on more advanced standards for future deployment without fear of being shut out.

The SMPTE header/descriptor standard that allows such extensible multiple standards to be transmitted and handled at the terminal/television level (see Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 12) is a major step forward in alleviating European and Japanese concerns.

Tom Hargadon