From My Point of View

(An observation on American television -- to attendees of the IBC-1999)

By Larry Bloomfield

 5467 words

Written in July 1999

5,467

Part I

 

 

It's just another typical day on this other side of the Atlantic in the wonderful world of television.  As an old military acronym goes, SNAFU - situation normal; all fouled up.  Well, may be it's not all that bad, but anyone unfamiliar with the way things are done over here can only sit back, suck their teeth and wonder how anything gets done at all.

 

Before I begin to share with you some of the more salient issues facing the American Broadcast industry, it is important to understand a few points that make us different.  You may or may not be familiar with the way things happen in the US.  In case you are not permit me to briefly explain.  If you are, read this anyhow, it's time for a refresher. 

 

Unlike television broadcasting in Europe, American television is based on the free enterprise system.  Stations must make money to survive.  There are no licenses associated with receiver ownership that gets directed back to the broadcasters.  Although there tends to be a lot of government intervention, which is usually in the wrong places and at the wrong times, there are no government subsidies to the broadcast industry. 

 

Those of you who know about us over here will immediately say:  "this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.  They have PBS, their Public Broadcast Service."  This is true, but despite their excellent programming, PBS is a small part of the American broadcast scene.  PBS stations operate primarily from donations, and annuities from private trust funds and the like, with only a small fraction of their operating costs coming from the federal government and even that is under fire as we speak.

 

Probably the most important part about American television is to understand that stations are ranked on how many viewers each can promise to deliver to a potential advertiser at any given time.  Obviously the more they can deliver, the more that can be charge.  The US is divided up into 211 non-overlapping markets, each having anywhere from one to several dozen different television stations, each competing for a finite amount of advertising dollars.  The important factor is how many households can a station deliver.  The top US market, New York City has 6,755,510 television households.  The smallest, Glendive, Montana has only 4,030 television households, but each and everyone are important.

 

It makes no difference how each station gets into the various homes in their respective markets, be it terrestrially, via cable or whatever.  Each station is ranked; however, according to the number of households each covers (called penetration) and their protracted viewership at any given time.  This is why any decrease in a station's coverage area, for any reason, could well be tantamount to financial suicide.  This is very important, so please hold this thought!

 

Viewership is determined in each market, by way of surveys that are conducted, on the average of four times a year, by a company called Nielsen.  They determine who is watching what.  These are called "sweeps."  The broadcast season in the US is from October through July.  The station with the greatest number of viewers gets to charge the highest for their commercial time, in accordance with what ever their market will bare.

 

There is any number of television networks offering programming of one kind or another competing for these viewers.  The most notable are the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), CBS television, FOX television and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC).  Each of these networks consists of several hundred stations located across the country.  About five percent are owned and operated (O&O's) by the networks themselves with the remainder being owned by individuals, companies, etc.  An owner is not supposed to have stations that have overlapping coverage areas.  Obviously the "prize stations" are those located in the larger markets. 

 

As the result of supposed expert studies, the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) was formed to develop the standards which would be recommended to the Federal regulatory agency the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  The ATSC settled on 18 different video formats that are composed of several different scan rates.  All 480-line pictures (4 by 3 aspect ratio) are considered standard definition.  These can be interlaced or progressively scanned and at frame rates of 24, 30 or 60 frames per second.  There are two different picture scenarios for high definition: 720 lines and 1080 lines.  The 720 line system can be either progressively scanned or interlace.  1080 is interlaced only, at this time and either can use any of the three frame rates mentioned earlier.

 

The method of modulation adopted is 8 levels of Vestigial Side Band or 8VSB into 6 MHz of bandwidth using a 19.4 Mbts packetized bit stream.  Initial testing of the system was done from a designated test station, WHD-TV in Washington, DC.  If for no other reason than "it was done this way in the past," an antenna was mounted atop a 30 foot mast to test the coverage area.  It appears that good engineering principals were used in these initial tests and these initial tests demonstrated that the 8VSB system would give comparable coverage to current NTSC or analog coverage.  What else could broadcasters ask for?

 

Packets are a neat digital way to deliver not only any of the various video formats, but audio and data as well.  The audio packet designed so that stations can offer AC-3 sound, which is a system of 5 full spectrum channels and a narrow band sub-bass channel.   It is frequently referred to as 5.1 channels.  One packet in the lot of four is reserved for data and other similar services.

 

The only problem with this "assumption" is that most Americans don't receive their television via an antenna on a 30-foot mast.  During the past twenty to thirty years the American cable industry has done a fine job of convincing the American public that they are the only source of television signals worthy of consideration.  Over the years, the American cable industry has been responsible for changes in building codes, the institution of neighborhood covenants and regulations prohibiting rooftop antennas in many neighborhoods and the list of their intrusions into television viewers lives are too numerous to list here.  The FCC has recently overturned many of these local rules.

 

If one were to go back twenty or thirty years and look around at the rooftops of most any American town and it looked like a porcupine on aluminum steroids!

 

Slowly, but surely, the cable companies began offering additional services that the average viewer wanted, but were unwilling to go to the trouble to install large satellite dishes or their associated equipment, to receive.  Today it is rare to see a TV antenna poking its directors, reflectors and driven elements into the sky to capture the signals of local TV stations.  Those that are still up are usually in serious disrepair.  

 

This scenario has caused the tuner industry to all but atrophy.  Until a small tuner company in Plano, TX came onto the scene a while back, not much has been done to improve tuners in any way over the years.  (Check out www.Microtune.com, Microtune's web page.)  The incentives have just not been there.  Why put dollars into making a better tuner when cable has and will dump significantly high levels of signal into the back of subscribers TV sets?  The set manufacturer's are in business to make money.  There aren't too many successful Don Quixote's in business anywhere in this day and age.  Cutting costs is part and parcel to corporate bottom lines.  There just hasn't been any challenge.

 

When a local television viewer has a reception problem, they typically call the local TV station to complain.  If it is a cable problem, a referral is made, but when it is not, the engineering staff will normally try to assist the viewer in resolving their problem.  In instances where the TV sets are not fed by the local copper signal purveyors (cable), the sets are quite frequently not attached to anything outside.  Having been a Chief Engineer, my staff and I have had to address any number of local receiving problems.  What we typically encountered for an antenna was anything from coat hangers to rabbit ears.  My associates at other stations frequently reported the same situation. 

 

I have no idea what the mindset of viewers in other countries may be.  In all practicality, viewers sophisticated or not as they may be here in the US, cannot be expected to modify their way of doing things as they make their transition to the wonderful world of digital television.  The industry must provide them with a broadcast system that will work under the same conditions as they've grown accustomed to in today's world, or digital television will not fly.  

 

The migration from analog to digital television began back in November 1998.  During the next six months, all stations in the top ten markets having network affiliations with ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC were required to have in place and operating a second digital television transmitter (40 stations).  This represents about 30% of US households.  Most made this schedule.  Eventually all stations, by May of 2002 will be required to have this second digital service in place, so many other stations have jumped in ahead of their scheduled time.  The only exception to this are the PBS stations; they have until May of 2003, but many are making the move early, as well. 

 

The second wave of the migration is in the process of taking place.  By November of this year, stations having network affiliations with ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC in the top thirty markets will be required to have in place and operating their second digital television transmitter.  This will bring the digital total, by November to 120 stations, which will represent coverage of fifty percent of US households.  With other stations working on a fast track to digital, there will really be more digital than this. 

 

There are a total of approximately 1600 analog television stations in the US today and at some point in time, when all digital stations are on line, this number will doubled.  That will not last for long as it is intended that in 2006, one of the two 6 MHz channels that each station will have will be surrendered, leaving only the digital service available to American viewers.

 

Other than differences in modulation technology and channel bandwidth (US 6 MHz - Europe typically 7 MHz), the one major difference between the European migration to digital, when compared to that here in the US, is the ability of US broadcasters to transmit what they are calling "high definition" pictures.  These are pictures ranging in size from about 2 million pixels in a 16 by 9 aspect ration format as compared with the more conventional 4 by 3 aspect ratio and significantly less than half the pixels of high definition.

 

Many US broadcasters are considering not transmitting the bandwidth hogging high definition signals on regular bases and devoting their 6 MHz allocation to multicasting.  Depending on the quality of the picture each broadcaster is willing to settle for, it has been demonstrated that up to 5 or 6 channels of pictures comparable to present day analog are possible.  Tests have gone as high as a dozen channels, but the picture quality of each isn't all that great.  Two stations have demonstrated, using bandwidth management techniques, that they can transmit one channel of high definition and one or two channels of standard.  All this is permissible in the US television digital standards.

 

This is all well and good, but if you can't get a stable picture on the screen, what good does any of this do?  One company, Sinclair Broadcasting, headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, (about seventy-five kilometers from Washington, DC) owns nearly 5 dozen stations consisting of both independents and various network affiliations, scattered in various markets across the US.  It is obvious they have a vested interest to see that each of the many markets they serve are protected and the new digital television methodology is equal to or better than their current coverage. 

 

Sinclair's reception tests have shown that there are some serious problems.  Remember that television has five parts: acquisition, manipulation, storage, distribution and display.  Agreeably these problems are either in the distribution - the ability to deliver the signals and/or in the display - the ability to capture and put these signals on a screen. 

 

Reports from several associates who had the opportunity to visit the Sinclair test sights, say it would appear that the problems lay in either the lack-luster robustness of 8VSB to deal with critical environments such as multipath and/or in the use of ancient receiver technology.  Sinclair used two different "off the shelf" receiver manufacturers' products in their testing.  A third receiver manufacturer refused to participate.  It is my understanding that at the time of the tests, no other receivers were available.  Since that time, an additional fourth manufacturer has joined the ranks and their "improved" designs appear to be performing much better. 

 

In light of the head-to-head, side-by-side tests, Sinclair has suggested the use of Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing  (COFDM) modulation adopted in the Digital Video Terrestrial Broadcasting (DVB-T) standard to remedy the apparent problems, as it appears to be more robust when the "real world" reception scenarios are taken into account.  It was hard for the engineers in attendance to refute cold hard facts.  As a result, there is growing support for the move to COFDM.  Many entrenched 8VSB supporters are either now on the fence or have joined with Sinclair in support of a move to COFDM

 

Needless to say the camps are forming and the arguments are taking on near religious proportions.  The issue boils down to basically two: Replace 8VSB with COFDM or Try to fix 8VSB with improved receiver design?  Based on the observations made so far, common sense would dictate that irrespective of the modulation system finally settled upon, receiver design must be addressed and improved soon.

 

If the move to COFDM is the answer, it would make more sense to delay the US migration into digital television and make changes to the modulation system now, with less than ten percent of the digital stations on the air, then to wait any longer.  This would also give receiver manufacturers time to make improvements at their end of the consumer pipeline.  The one big down side to all this is that someone somewhere will have to eat the cost of the 8VSB modulators already in use.  That could hurt -- big time.  Remember who pays for things at US TV stations.  They are in business to make money.  I've yet to see any run by Don Quixote and there are no government subsides here. 

 

It is interesting to note that many of the display devices (receivers) made so far, to accommodate digital television here in the US have their RF-tuner section made as a separate unit external to the set.  It is even priced separately.  Did they, by some slim chance, know something the rest of us didn't?  If the move to COFDM does take place, what is to become of the 8VSB receiver boxes: expensive doorstops or boat anchors?  Who will have to eat the cost of these units?

 

I wished I could say: "This is the way US digital television will be."  Then I could move on to give you a full positive report, but that is just not the case.  I don't believe there is anyone who is in any position who could do that now or in the near future. 

 

Stay tuned for part of my From My Point of View

 

 

 

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From My point of View  - Part II

 

Part One of From My Point of View dealt with the terrestrial side of digital television in America.  That's only a part of it all.  If you will recall we mentioned that there is an eighty- percent penetration of cable into American homes.  America also has a very thriving Direct-to-home (DTH) satellite business, which has narrowed down to two major players, DirecTV and EchoStar. 

 

In all fairness to the American cable industry, they are making strides at replacing much of their copper infrastructure with fiber and some, nearly ten percent, have instituted digital delivery into their subscriber's homes.  All DTH services are digitally delivered. 

 

It is important to distinguish the difference between digital television and digital delivery, as it tends to cloud the issue.  The key operating term here is "delivery!"  I did not say it was digital television.  Digital television in the US, as I am discussing it here, is one of the 18 video formats, as spelled out by the ATSC, along with digitized (possibly AC-3) audio, put into packets along with a digital packet for data, at ~19.4 Mbts in a 6 MHz channel.  Digital delivery, as DTH and Cable is currently concerned, is nothing more than digitization of the NTSC analog signals for purposes of transporting them. 

 

To emphasize this, DirecTV, a totally digitally delivered service, currently carries a half-dozen or so different movie channels from one of their programming services, Home Box Office (HBO).  DirecTV has announced that beginning August 1^st of this year, they added an additional HBO service, high definition television (HDTV) in the 1080i format (1080 lines interlaced).  Those of us who have DirecTV in our homes will not be able to receive this service.  To do so, it would be necessary to buy a special Integrated Receiver Decoder (IRD) that would interface with a digital-ready display unit, not a normal analog TV set.

 

DTH is the only real competitor to cable television in the US and, I must add, quite a formidable one at that.  Current figures shows DTH into no less than eleven million homes and the numbers are growing monthly at a very impressive rate.  This is an area in which I believe digital television will have little or no trouble gaining a foothold and becoming a huge success. 

 

With both DTH and cable into my home, and having seen both at many other venues, except in those rare areas where cable has installed digital delivery, the quality of cable leaves very much to be desired.  This is a paradox when you consider cable's penetration.  Unless cable makes some serious strides at improving their quality, viewers will continue to make the move to DTH.  The costs are very competitive.  It is obvious DTH has total US coverage.  Cable is limited to how far they've strung their wire or fibers.

 

In many parts of the US, a device called a translator is used to extend the range of television stations into otherwise geographically isolated areas.  This device receives the main signal and rebroadcasts it on a different frequency or channel, sometime cross-banded, and usually at substantially lower power levels.  I was Chief Engineer at a small market TV station that had 8 translators.  As an example of how big a roll translaters play, there are over five hundred each in the non-contiguous states of Oregon and Utah alone.  One Salt Lake City, Utah station serves over 100 translators.  It is not uncommon for one translator to feed other translators in a daisy chain arrangement.  Though rare, a viewer could conceivably receive their signal through as many as a half dozen translators.  Some cable services use these translator systems to feed their head-ends. It is important to note that little or nothing has been done to address the replacement of translators in the US and they are not compatible with digital television.   

  

It doesn't take an Oxford scholar to figure out that it is essential for US broadcasters, in an effort to maintain their life's blood of profits and the bottom line, to realize that it all starts with getting their signals, digital or analog, into viewers' homes.  If they can't do that, all the best programming and most modern equipment in the world won't make a hill of beans difference.  Until DTH has more of a foothold and the DTH local-into-local issues are resolved (another big issue over here), cable is still the primary method of getting local signals into the TV sets of US viewers

 

The FCC put a deadline of July 2000 for the industry to come up with Application Programming Interface (APIs) standards. These APIs are crucial to the industry, as they are needed for the interoperability of Set Top Boxes (STBs).   It also doesn't take a Caltech (California Institute of Technology) grad to realize that the US cable industry is in deep trouble.   Many US broadcasters had hoped that something positive would come out of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) convention back in June, but the expected commitment to deliver OpenCable specifications for retail-ready advanced digital set top boxes (STBs) was not forthcoming. 

 

This is an important issue to US broadcasters because time is running out. When in place, this could will be a money maker for local broadcast stations.  If they haven't already, someone had better get to burning that midnight oil and stop the lollygaging, otherwise the ripple effect will impact the arrival of interactive services for everyone.

 

Many US broadcasters went to the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB '99) convention in April of this year hoping to see technology and services that could be use to help pay for their migration to digital television.  Many had hoped that some of the digital services touted to be part of the benefits packaged with digital television technology would help defray some of these costs.  Interactivity plays a big roll in this arena.

 

In a letter dated July 1, 1999, signed by the US Consumers Electronics Manufacturers Association (CEMA) President, Gary Shapiro to FCC Chairman William Kennard, CEMA expressed its concerned.  Shapiro promised the FCC Chairman that they will make every effort to "reach an agreement with the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) by October 31, 1999 on the necessary technical and operating specifications for digital receiver-ready cable systems and cable-ready digital receivers."  Shapiro also said: "We also will work to complete "build-to" standards based on the agreement by the end of 1999."  More than just a few hope this is not just more political smoke and mirrors.

 

There is no question that a decision of this magnitude has to be made carefully and it takes a lot of consultation and decision-making.  A cooperative effort on everyone's part would be ideal, but a pie-in-the-sky concept.  Cooperation is a nearly forgotten or unheard of concept in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley.  The road to define software specifications, that would meet industry OS-agnostic and CPU-agnostic principles, should be an easy one.  There is no shortage of talent either here in the US or abroad, but corporate egos and nationalistic one-sidedness are usually the greatest impediments to progress.

 

There is little doubt that the high-priced help in cable industry is not letting all this happen without some serious consideration from their standpoints.  Cable operators have a lot to lose if they cannot come up with something by the rapidly approaching deadline.  First their sanctioned territorial monopolies may be confronted with something that would be new to them: competition and there are those who wouldn't shed much of a tear should that happen.

 

CableLabs chief technical officer, Richard Prodan told regulators that the software aspects of the OpenCable spec are a "high priority."  Prodan expects there should be some sort of standard established by the end of this year, and rightly so, but voices from the PC and consumer-electronics industries are not quit as optimistic, saying it may take a year or more to sort out the various issues. 

 

All sides of this issue should look to their digital brothers for answers, but Silicon Valley is young and undisciplined.  It's time for the computer and software geeks to wake up and get to work.  Living and working in the Silicon Valley certainly has been an experience for this broadcast engineer.  It is not difficult to empathize with others in the broadcast industry who try to get things done only to run into very well camouflaged roadblocks.  The lack of understanding by the computer types for the applications that non-computer industries need is appalling.

 

In light of all this, it is not difficult to understand why it has become necessary for the cable industry's business expectations for OpenCable-compatible digital set-tops, to dramatically shift during this past year.  Discussions with many of the STB designers and projections for impressive specifications and applications for the first wave of the new generation of STBs that could fully get things going for the two-way cable infrastructure have all but been scrapped for now.  The current genre of STB specification dictates nothing more than a plain-vanilla box with an electronic programming guide (EPG) for digital pay-per-view and not much else.

 

It was expected that with the deregulation of STB ownership by the FCC, droves of new features would attract a whole new market for this kind of device, but it is not difficult to see why this has just not happened.  The American public will not pay several hundred dollars for an STB that does little more than give them what they already have.  As Alan McCullough, president and chief executive officer of Circuit City Stores Inc. (Richmond, Va.), a major US electronics specialty story, has said on several occasions, retailers want something with competitive functionality to sell that encompasses more than just basic functionality.

 

Don't look for all the fancy bells and whistle features expected to be part of the bi-directional digital cable business from STB makers as they are few and far between. Referring back to the days, a couple of years ago, when OpenCable first saw the day of light, James Bonan, vice president of new-business development for the Consumer Audio/Video Products Group of Sony Electronics Inc., says the industry is "right back where it started - defining what interactivity means and what it needs to do."

 

Nothing has been said so far about the consumer who wants more than just an STB with OpenCable compatibility.  For the consumer electronic companies that build terrestrial digital television, cable and Internet devices, the concerns go much farther than how to build the OpenCable compatibility into the set.  Concerns must be addressed relative to maintaining the integrity of devices based on the dissimilarity of the various platforms.

 

The API debate has split the industry into two factions.  In truth, if the two sides lineage is traced back to its genesis, you'd find two internationally known competitors at the bottom of all this.  One side wants Java Virtual Machine-based interoperability for advance digital STBs and terrestrial digital television sets.  The other faction wants to achieve a common content spec across cable, satellite, terrestrial and Internet transmissions.  

 

 The Java group is synonymous with Sun Microsystems and a few cable operators, with a host of consumer-electronics companies under the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC)'s DTV Application Software Environment (DASE) group. The group is forging key elements now for a common Java TV API for cable and terrestrial TV.

 

The competing group is led by the supporters of the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATVEF), which was founded by none other than Microsoft, Intel Corp., and a number of media companies. Go figure!

 

The crux of the issue is the scalability of interactive data services. As mentioned before, broadcasters went to NAB '99 looking for ways to help pay for the transition to digital television by finding solutions in the area of Datacasting.  Not many had their expectations satisfied.  Depending on the complexity of the programming and execution environments designed for TV data broadcasting, the emerging datacast spec will profoundly affect next-generation TV receiver and set-top architectures.  It would be best for broadcasters to continue their supplications to "the Force" in hopes their prayers are ultimately answered.

 

For any progress to be made something has got to give and at this point of development, no one appears willing.  Many view compromises as doing something that neither party wanted to do to begin with.

 

Nothing would make Microsoft happier than to have the cable industry standardize on a product that would reprise their track record with DOS & Windows, but now in the cable TV industry. On the other side of that coin, major cable operators are very paranoid about letting Microsoft control anything.

 

Common sense says that we'll eventually see a series of API recommendations, but the new API will almost have to take into account currently in use legacy APIs.

 

Perhaps the saddest part of the whole US digital television story is the FCC's roll or should I say non-roll.  Instead of helping resolve these issues, the FCC continues to press the cable and consumer-electronics companies, telling them they should try to work out their digital television/cable compatibility issues.  This lack of effort is no surprise to US broadcasters as they all know that picking up a pencil to help with something of this sort might give one of those governmental bureaucrats a hernia. 

 

Instead of being the FCC of a bygone era; the FCC that once helped to develop the American broadcast industry into one of the technically finest on the planet; that helped the industry when issues of this import and magnitude, came up, I suspect that they will most likely take their typical "wait and see posture while the ship bobs aimlessly around.

 

The FCC is supposed to be the stewards of the US's public airwaves. It is sad!  This is the same FCC that has evolved from a fine, respected governmental organization into the money grubbing pawns and puppets of governmental bean counters who are deathly afraid of their own shadows when it comes to setting technical policy and standards.  I could go on for pages more, but will spare both of us the pain.

 

A final observation from this side of the duck pond, it used to be that the money paid by sponsors for network television shows not only gilded the network's treasury, but was shared with some or all of the network affiliates.  Those days are rapidly going away.  Networks are continuously complaining about the raising production and acquisition costs. The networks are asking local stations to share in the cost of network programming production or give back some of the network avails.  These Avails are highly prized commercial time slots the networks make available to the local stations to sell during their shows.  These time slots command a very high premium and the local stations would be hard pressed to give them up.  This could spell the death of network news shows.  Local stations could buy clips from independent sources and air them in their own programs.  Many stations say it would be less expensive to do it that way.

 

The whole concept strikes at the basic fabric of network television and, if it happens, will begin to unravel the whole concept. When stations sign affiliate agreements, they say they will air all or a large percentage of the network fair.  If they have to pay for what they receive, you can bet they may not want the entire network fair and begin to pick and choose.  This will have a serious effect on programming.   This is one thing that bears watching over the next year or so.

 

No my crystal ball is still not working, but it is totally clear to me that the future of digital television lies in some, as yet defined, hybrid of traditional TV broadcasting and Internet-TV.  It is also clear that the various contributing factors in this cauldron must coexist.  It may come as a shock, but we Americans must wake up and realize we do not live on this planet alone.  Standards should no longer be colloquial in nature, but be universal in concept and application.  This concept is not restricted to us, but the whole world.  As an associate of mine recently said, "Miss this boat and you miss everything."  I respect and support any of the international forums such as the various MPEG groups for their international concepts, makeup and approaches.  

 

I can not close with out saying, as much as I take issue with the various parts of the US broadcast, cable and digital industries, not to mention the federal government, I continually thank my lucky stars that I live in a country that permits me to do so.  My sole purpose in all of this is to prod those who can, to do their best; to encourage those who can't, to get out of the way and for the rest to help in what ever way they can.  Your comments are welcome.  E-mail:  HDTVGuy@aol.com

(Note: This e-mail address is long gone - use HDTVGuy@starband.net )

 

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