[opendtv] Re: The Guardian: TV should switch to internet, peers suggest

  • From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2015 08:27:06 -0400

On Oct 17, 2015, at 7:25 PM, Albert Manfredi <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Even though this article is from July 2012, with the reverse spectrum auction
looming next year, it seems very timely for the US.

Bert

Not exactly sure what is timely about this for the U.S.

The revolution started here in the U.S. and is now spreading across the globe.

There is nothing new about the idea that the spectrum is better used for things
that move. Nicholas Negroponte is credited with proposing what became known as
the Negroponte switch at the time we were developing the U.S. DTV standard.
This is from a 1997 Negroponte blog in Wired:

http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED5-08.html
George Gilder and I have shared the podium frequently, and I have learned a
lot from him. One of our first encounters occurred about 10 years ago at an
executive retreat organized by Northern Telecom (now called Nortel). At this
meeting, I showed a slide that depicted wired and wireless information
trading places. This idea had been prompted, in part, by some early HDTV
discussions, during which I and others questioned whether broadcast TV should
get any spectrum at all, since stationary TV sets could be better served by
wires (read: fiber).

In contrast, the theory continued, anything that moves needs to be wireless.
Phones, largely wired at the time, would go wireless, and TV, largely
wireless, would get wired. Gilder called this "the Negroponte Switch," even
though Jim McGroddy at IBM or someone at the Media Lab may have suggested it
first.
A decade later, it seems that this whole switching of places has been
contradicted left and right. Satellite TV is doing fine. HDTV just got new
spectrum. And the cable business is starting to include telephony. So how
should one look at RF today?

...
What this suggests is that wireless communication should be designed with the
nature of the bits in mind. This issue is not wired versus wireless but the
strength of the signal. It also means that you had better not sell short the
landline phone company or makers of fiber optic cable.

In the end, we have to remember that nature has provided us with only one
radio spectrum, no matter how cleverly we choose to use it. In contrast,
insofar as a single fiber is more or less equal to the whole RF spectrum, the
bandwidth of fiber landlines is infinite, since we can keep on making more
and more, running the factories three shifts a day, seven days a week. For
this reason, the granularity of RF will get smaller and smaller, for more and
more personal bits.


When I worked with Negroponte and the folks at the Media Lab in the early '90s,
trying to educate the FCC about the coming revolution, the technology was
lagging behind the visions. Some of us were still using the Motorola "brick"
phone. I got my first laptop in 1992, and dialed into Applelink to access
e-mail when we wrote the SMPTE/IEEE Task Force Report on Digital Imaging.

Yesterday, after finishing lunch at a restaurant with my kids, I "tuned into"
the FSU/Louisville game on Watch ESPN. I used my cellular data, but there were
several WiFi hot spots that I could have accessed.

As Negroponte recognized a decade after he predicted "the switch," hardly any
communications is truly wireless. I have a set of walkie talkies, but why
bother using them? If I wander off in a store, my wife calls me on her iPhone.
Those bits travel much farther than the distance between our phones: to a cell
tower, back to a phone switch, back to the cell tower, then to my phone. When I
"tuned into" that football game, only the last hop from the cell tower to my
phone was wireless. The phone did "tune" to a cellular channel, but not in the
classic sense of a TV broadcast; it just accessed a carrier that was available
at the moment.

The FCC opening bid document that Bert posted was eye opening from the
perspective of just how valuable the spectrum has become. I worked at channel
20 in Gainesville in 1979, shortly after the station was purchased for a few
million dollars. At the time it was losing money, but by the mid '80s it was
making millions a year in profits. The opening bid for that channel is now
pegged at more than $149 million if the spectrum is returned.

One wonders how such a high valuation can be justified. The fact that we pay
nearly $200/month to AT&T for four phones and 15 GB of data is the obvious
answer.

But if Negroponte (version 2) is correct, it won't be long before WiFi will be
so ubiquitous that cellular data will only be needed when moving between urban
areas. Clearly, the use of the spectrum for TV broadcasting is unnecessary; but
one can question whether it is in the best interest of the people who own the
spectrum to license it to the highest bidder rather than significantly
increasing the amount of unlicensed spectrum for the "last mile"

I'm sure Bert liked this part of the 2012 UK article:

All of this means that a new way of watching is emerging. Instead of letting
the channel controller decide the time and content of our evening's
entertainment, the internet is giving viewers the power to choose for
themselves.

On these connected screens, the traditional television channel, broadcasting
one programme at a time, with a menu determined by the time of day, may no
longer have a reason for being.

I disagree. Live linear channels - delivered via the Internet - will still
appeal to a portion of the audience, although only in proportion to the
"originality" of the content they offer. These linear channels will need a
healthy proportion of live events, news and original premieres to survive.

I would also note that the reason I had to access that game via the Internet
yesterday is that my wife dragged me to a restaurant with her grandson, rather
than letting me stay home to watch the live linear broadcast on our HDTV. I
was recording the game on the DVR, so "no excuse, you can watch it later."

Regards
Craig







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