[opendtv] Foolish Legacy Thinking
- From: "John Willkie" <johnwillkie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:52:44 -0800
Here in Southern California, and I suspect in other areas of the country, we
get traffic reports on the radio 24 hours a day. Even "all-news" radio
stations don't provide newscasts 24 hours a day, but they provide traffic
around the clock.
On television, traffic reports are in the morning news and, for some strange
reason, the noon news, and so people at home know when to expect the
bread-winner, in the 5/6 p.m.news. The only time we hear of traffic in the
late-evening news is when there are serious traffic conditions at that hour.
Never is television giving traffic news 24 hours a day.
Prime time for television is 8-11 p.m. That's the time of day that most
people are watching television. Prime time for radio is 5-9 a.m., because
all but a few people only listen to the radio in their car, and most people
drive to work in those hours. There's a little bit of a bump in the
afternoon, but the ratings are only a fraction of the morning ratings.
So, what day parts will be the "prime-time" for ATSC M/H services?
If you - cough - listen to Bert, he thinks that he will be able to fully
enjoy some new, other wise magically-denied-to-him ATSC M/H content at home.
I presume this will be during prime time and not during working hours. Some
ATSC M/H content will simply be simulcasts of what is offered on the main
channel. I see little possibility of people forsaking HDTV or SDTV content
at home for ATSC M/H simulcasts, unless they otherwise can't get good
pictures from the main channel(s).
Other ATSC M/H content will, at least ultimately, be geared towards people
with little time and who are on the move. Can anyone imagine spending hours
at home watching weather and traffic reports, and guidance on the best route
to take between the Beltway and Vienna, VA? Since most people are on the
move at hours that aren't prime time for television, can you imagine
spending that time watching at home during the day?
Some M/H bandwidth can be used for file multicasts, the "edge caches" that
Craig pines for. This content needs to be aggregated over a span or spans
of time, and stored somewhere. It's possible that some of this stuff will
be renderable on television sets, but it's also possible that some of it
will be video games and other such widgets.
The other thing to keep in mind is that ATSC M/H permits dynamic
re-allocation of "packets" between the main and enhanced layers on a
near-instantaneous basis. So, the portion of the transport devoted to M/H
services during the day need not be the same as the M/H portion in the
evening. And, overnight could be a different case entirely.
Thinking that this will lead to all sorts of new, live linear content during
the time of the day that most people watch television is just foolish legacy
thinking. Most services will tend to have different offerings during the
day than at night, and when a service ('virtual channel') disappears, each
M/H broadcast (a term of art for the M/H portion of a transport) will have a
primary channel that receivers will revert to. I suspect that since form
follows function, many ATSC M/H services will make the 30/60-minute form of
broadcast television seem to be "extremely long form."
Remember those phony filters that one could put in front of a monochrome
television set to either 1) simulate color television or 2) an acid trip?
To me, those make about as much sense as watching ATSC M/H content, live,
passively, at home.
John Willkie
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