Faulty Digital TV Standard Blurs Market Picture
Christopher Stern writes in the Daily Variety dated July 28, 1999 that Sinclair Broadcasting has come important people in the television industry wondering if they just made the second-biggest blunder of the information age. ""The Y2K fiasco still has a secure hold on the No. 1 spot, but Sinclair may be close to picking up a runner-up award as it probes a serious weakness in he digital TV standard that has been in use in this country for less than a year. Last fall, the first commercial digital signal launched with the promise that your local TV station will be able to provide a reliable, crystal-clear picture and CD-quality sound. But it turns out that first generation digital TVs have a lot of trouble receiving and displaying these high-tech signals, especially in urban areas. Sinclair is calling on the industry to abandon the standard that took 10 years and $500 million to develop and switch to the European standard, which it says provides a much more dependable signal."" Stern continues, ""A side-by-side demonstration conducted in Sinclairí S hometown of Baltimore has convinced many broadcast engineers of the strengths of the European digital standard compared with the U.S. format that is already up and running on 69 stations. Those who have seen the demo said the signals generated by Europeís rival technology are much stronger and can be picked up with greater ease than the American version. The big difference is that a digital TV using the European system can pick up a reliable picture using a simple antenna that rests on top of the set; the U.S. standard requires an antenna to be carefully aimed, and even then, it is unpredictable and subject to blackouts. U.S. digital television is an all-or-nothing proposition. You either get a perfect picture or none at all. The official line from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is that the problem does not lie in the digital standard but in the expensive new TV sets. ëIt is incumbent on set makers to build better sets. Itís a receiver problem,í NAB spokesman Dennis Wharton said. Imagine what it feels like to be one of those people who have shelled out more than $5,000 for a fancy new digital TV only to find out that it may already be obsolete. The so-called early adopters who already have bought a digital set canít even; use cable to bypass their current problems with over-the-air transmission. Digital sets are not cable-compatible because TV set makers, the cable industry and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) are haggling over copyright protection for digital programming. The first cable-ready digital sets are still six months to a year away from production. Even when these sets hit the stores, there will be no guarantee that you will be able to get a digital broadcast signal via cable. Many cable systems arenít even sure they will carry broadcastersí digital signals. Most in the industry are sure that some kind of technological bandage will be found to resolve the current problem. After all, industry lobbyists are claiming, they canít possibly buy back the 40,000 digital sets already sold. But they may have to. Imagine how Congress is going to react after giving the TV industry billions of dollarsí worth of digital airwaves free, only to find out that the broadcasters had stacked all of their chips on a losing technology.""