[opendtv] Re: Bob, where are the tunerless monitors?

From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 18:14:29 -0400
Craig Birkmaier wrote:

> Better pictures is NOT helping broadcasters hold onto viewers.
> This past season represents the most serious erosion of their
> audience to date. Much of the programming - can you say Reality
> Sucks - is not worth watching, but the real killer to me is the
> increased commercial load.

Content has to duke it out, no question about that. And hopefully
reality shows are running their course and will be banished for all
time. Who knows.

One piece of good news is that there are no shopping networks at all
left in the OTA offerings in this market. So you see, these things can
improve with time.

But the HD question is something else. My response has not changed since
the mid 1990s. Which is, the broadcaster with HD will get more eyeballs,
all else equal, than the one without HD. So broadcasters will migrate to
HD, and have.

It's like anything else. The movie theater with stadium seating and
enormous screens will get more clients than the theater that refuses to
update. Given a choice, and either identical or similar content, viewers
will migrate to the higher quality venues.

> But there's a bit of a catch 22 here. If they find that there
> is an audience for mobile video and data services- and I think
> they will, they will need to take bits away from their "legacy"
> ATSC broadcasts.

That's completely fair. That's how it should work. If the mobile
audience is big and powerful enough to demand these new services, the
broadcasters will naturally have to accommodate them. Simple economics.

If OTA viewers scream loud enough, and there isn't enough room in the 6
MHz channel for high quality OTA TV, broadcasters might have to respond
by pushing H.264 compression through the ATSC process. That's how this
is supposed to work. Broadcasters should hold the cards. The ATSC should
be like the IETF, and respond to the needs of the service providers.

> Sadly, we could now be shipping ATSC receivers with advanced
> codec support - instead we are entrenching MPEG-2, making it
> even more difficult to change the receiver base moving forward.

If necessary, STBs can be sold for the update. This should be standard
procedure. There will of course be a pushback to changing an existing
standard, as there always is, but if the improvement is worth the agony,
it can happen.

Anyway, I don't think this MPEG-2 compression to AVC will provide the
huge improvement yet, but maybe by now it does. I think people make a
bigger deal of this than it deserves.

Bert
 
 
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[opendtv] Re: Bob, where are the tunerless monitors?

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