[opendtv] Re: News: FCC: All Sets Must Have DTV Tuners
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 15:10:23 -0500
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
> It looks like the FCC has killed another market for
> portable televisions. Yesterday the commission
> ordered that ALL television "receivers" must include
> an ATSC tuner by March 1, 2007; existing rules only
> required receivers 13" and larger to include an ATSC
> tuner.
There has to be a way to differentiate a "TV set" from
a hand-held device similar to a cell phone. But
whatever the case may be, any device which now depends
on NTSC has to be covered by the FCC. Obviously, you
can't have analog shutoff if people continue to come
out of the woodwork screaming that their particular
gizmo will become disenfranchised. All such gizmo
makers and users have to be warned of the shutoff, and
provisions made to transition. Seems obvious, no?
Yes, I agree that short term, any portable device
classified as "TV set" (as opposed to hand-held
appliance) will have to be built on a laptop PC model.
With a rechargeable battery that will provide maybe 2
hours of charge, but which accepts AC input as well.
I expect that portable radios, in the US, will
continue to depend on the analog signal of the IBOC
channel, rather than drain their battery to get to the
digital sidebands. DAB doesn't have that option. I
haven't heard anything about cutting off the analog
portion of IBOC (which is to the detriment of the
digital signal, of course; there's no free lunch).
> I guess this clears the way for cell phone video
> services and portable media players. U.S. TV
> Broadcasters can now forget about reaching hand held
> receivers, except via legacy NTSC devices.
Legacy NTSC devices are going to be useless in this
category. The FCC is doing what it should have done in
2004, if it was really serious about shooting for a
1/1/2007 analog shutoff date.
Seems to me that extending the analog cutoff to 2009
has very simply allowed the CE vendors to delay what
they could have done in 2004. (Why they delayed, I
must conclude, is a perception that there's no demand
for OTA that couldn't be met by analog devices.)
> makes one wonder if the commissioners are going to
> get desperate and mandate an ATSC tuner in cell
> phones and other devices that can receive bits from
> sources other than NTSC broadcasts?
Why should they? Service to hand-helds would be either
DVB-H or MediaFlo. Just like in Europe, a separate
stream from the DTT programming. Even if, in Europe,
the frequency band for DVB-H is the same as DTT
service.
The only people who have anything to gripe about would
be the DTT broadcasters, who have to make special
arrangements to get their hand-held-specific content
to hand-held devices. But consumers of "regular" DTT
might actually prefer it this way. Because the service
to larger TV sets won't be compromised by having to
set aside bandwidth for the video snippets broadcast
in infinite loops to hand-helds.
Bert
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