Featured Article:
Heads We Win; Tails You Lose
By Craig Birkmaier, Technologist & Contributing Editor, Television Broadcast and Videography
I've recently endured one of those seminal events in life, in which a bunch of brain cells that haven't been stimulated in years were awakened. Three days of hell, sorting through 74 years of accumulated memories, in order to move my mother from a six-room apartment into a one bedroom efficiency. Box after endless box... a lifetime of experiences dredged up one last time on the way to the their final resting place in a Pennsylvania landfill. Among them a few mementos that just couldn't be thrown away, like that bawdy little coin my dad kept in his desk drawer.
On the front is the voluptuous naked torso of a woman with the words "Heads I win." On the flip side a shapely derriere with the words "Tails you lose." Good odds if you can get 'em.
Could a coin like this have been used to guide the process of selecting critical components of the ATSC standard?
Heads 8-VSB wins... tails COFDM loses. Heads interlace wins... tails progressive loses.
Heads NTSC wins... tails, DTV is a loser.
The Win-Lose Assumption
One year into the forced migration to DTV, we are told that broadcasters are holding up their end of the bargain. The top 30 markets are on the air, and the networks are delivering about 30 hours a week of HDTV programs; it took more than a decade for that much color programming to become available.
We are told that when people see HDTV, they say: "When can I get one?" What we are not told is how these consumers react when they learn what "one" will cost.
One year after the introduction of DTV broadcasting in several of the nation's largest markets, a statistically insignificant number of DTV-ready displays--about 50,000--have been sold, mostly as components of upscale home theater systems. Of these, only about 5,000 have been sold with ATSC tuners.
Also during the past year, about 24 million NTSC receivers were sold, including more than a million non-HDTV rear-screen projection TVs. Sales of DVD video players are up more than 300 percent over the previous year; on track to sell more than 2 million units this year. Meanwhile, DirecTV and Echostar are signing up more than 250,000 new DBS subscribers per month. About 80 percent of U.S. homes now subscribe to a multichannel cable or DBS service. It is safe to say that the migration to digital television is well underway.
Yet broadcasters and consumer electronics manufacturers see little reason for concern about the lack of interest in terrestrial DTV broadcasting. They tell us to stay the course.
Why?
Perhaps it has something to do with the win/lose proposition they have created for terrestrial DTV broadcasting. The DTV spectrum is safely locked up and many broadcasters are in no rush to exploit this resource, as long as those NTSC oil-wells keep pumping. The consumer electronic folks are happy to continue selling NTSC receivers while their factories crank out tens of thousands of digital set-top boxes every day.
The Congressional Budget Office has told Congress not to expect much in the way of revenues from the 2002 auctions of the NTSC channels "scheduled" for return in 2006. According to the CBO, the thresholds for DTV receiver penetration set by Congress, which determine when the NTSC channels must be returned, may never be met.
The most important DTV related news story of 1999, however, is that broadcast affiliates are an expensive liability. Cable and DBS are willing to compensate the networks for each set of eyeballs they deliver; affiliate compensation will soon be history.
Heads they win... tails you lose.
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