C/Net interviewed Gary Shapiro, president of CEA, about the DTV conversion in the United States:
Q: You said last week that the DTV transition was “the equivalent of putting a man on the moon.” That’s quite a comparison. Can you explain why you think this was such a dramatic feat?
A: We first started this in the early 1980s as the next generation of television. (The CEA) along with broadcasters got together and talked about ways to (move to digital). We agreed on a joint effort and a whole bunch of things over time: It was going to be over a large geographic area, both urban and rural, and would meet the needs of over-the-air broadcasters.
There were 20 proposals from companies, and eventually we created the Advanced Television (eventually called “digital TV”) testing centers. Then General Instruments came in the late ’80s/early ’90s and had a digital way of doing it. That stopped everything. We said, “This is such a revolutionary thing. We have to look at this again.” Eventually everything came around from that.
Q: Was it a harder sell to the manufacturers or the broadcasters?
Manufacturers are always wanting the next big thing. The broadcasters were the biggest challenge by far. They saw nothing to be gained by this. The only argument was, “Look, cable will get there, satellite will get there, and you’ll become the inferior medium.” They felt they couldn’t charge more for advertising in HD. They (eventually) had the foresight to say look, if we’re going to do this right, broadcasters can’t be left in the dark. And frankly they on their own funded a lot of the testing and research.
But I think broadcasters blew it in that HDTV was their one opportunity to get ahead of cable and satellite in the sense that it was cheaper for them to go to HDTV because they could just send out (an HD) broadcast signal. They just have to invest in the towers. It could have been their competitive advantage.
(Once agreed upon) in 1996 we went forward and developed the first and best DTV standard. And if you compare that with other places in the world, Japan started with an analog advanced television standard, and they sold TV sets and had to recall them when digital came along because they realized they’d be left behind.
Europe went a totally different way. They said high definition is not important, regular digital television is fine, European consumers don’t care about the quality that Americans care about. And that also turned out to be a huge mistake, because although their broadcasters were fine with that, along came the satellite people and the TV set makers that started selling high-definition televisions and (high-def feeds). And all of sudden the broadcasters are left out in the cold. So they had to quickly develop their own high-definition standard. So the U.S. is really the first place in the world that did it right and a lot of people are trying to emulate us.
The U.S. was the first actually to transition in such a wide scale way, to all of the country all at once. The Europeans, they kind of did it segmented by geographic area and countries are still doing it. Most of the world hasn’t even gotten there yet.
I doubted the viability of ATSC. I believed it wouldn’t work for large segments of the population because of it’s ghost-prone 8-VSB modulation. I was wrong. Still, most of the world has gone with other digital television standards. The only major adopters for ATSC are North America and Korea.
European DVB-T uses COFDM modulation, used in WiFi, WiMAX, LTE and MediaFLO. United States broadcasters rejected COFDM, going along with the royalty-sharing ATSC gang. IMHO, the United States lacked vision. Broadcasters didn’t care about mobility in 1996. It was more about extended contour maps for advertisers ten years ago.
Enhanced VSB is an optional enhancement to the original ATSC Standards that use the 8VSB modulation system. ATSC-M/H (Advanced Television Systems Committee – Mobile/Handheld) is a candidate standard in the USA for mobile digital TV, that allows TV broadcasts to be received by mobile devices and partly uses the 19.39 Mbit/s ATSC 8VSB stream. Still, the overhead of ATSC-M/H might be considered inefficient compared to COFDM.
I like the broadcast model. It’s the cheapest form of simultaneous distribution. E-books and multi-media will now likely have go with a subscription-based unicasting solution using Mobile WiMAX or LTE. Whether newspapers and local broadcasters could have prospered with a rugged, mobile datacasting solution based on COFDM is anyone’s guess.
In other news, Om Malik interviewed FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on Mobile, Broadband, iPhone & Innovation. BTW, the government’s DTV set top converter box coupon program officially ended on July 31, with a total of 34,757,982 households approved to receive coupons during the program’s lifetime.
