[opendtv] Re: NBC's Reitmeier to head ATSC board
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2006 08:07:28 -0500
At 9:26 AM -0500 12/7/06, Allen Le Roy Limberg wrote:
Glenn was a lab director at Sarnoff Laboratories for a number of years
before joining NBC and is knowledgeable about DTV receiver issues as well as
DTV transmitter issues. He is pretty good at speaking out on systems and
business issues, so I think he should be a good addition to the ATSC board.
Note: Glenn is NOT an addition to the ATSC board. Just taking his
turn as the rotating head of the board.
I've spent many hours discussing DTV issues with Glenn. He clearly
understand all of the key issues, and has used this knowledge to
protect the OTA franchise. When I say protect, I mean the business
interests of the companies that made certain that the DTV spectrum
would not be used to field a competitive service to cable and DBS.
Thomson was a key sponsor of Sarnoff and was instrumental in the
development of the DirecTV system - Thomson built the first half
million STBs for DirecTV. NBC was also part of the Sarnoff consortium
that built one of the proposed systems prior to the Grand Alliance.
And then there was Bob Rast, who came to the ATSC from General
Instruments, where much of the compression technology used for DBS
was developed. As a result of the development of the technologies
that eventually became MPEG-2, the U.S. abandoned the original
augmentation scheme that would have used two 6 MHz channels to
deliver HDTV and moved to a single 6 MHz channel digital system.
And did I mention the way the MPEG-2 process was corrupted, when
Sony, Thomson, Sarnoff, GI, and other broadcast interests took it
over and entrenched outdated technologies like interlace for SD and
HD? Or that they did this again with H.264?
The point here is that the people behind the ATSC are also the people
behind the DBS industry and the consumer electronics industry. They
were not primarily concerned about the viability of the U.S. DTV
standard - if anything they did their best to cripple it. What they
wanted, AND GOT, was the force of government behind the idea that
everyone would need to upgrade to HDTV capable receivers/displays.
As we have seen in another thread this week, HDTV is now a legitimate
success, at least in the U.S., and it achieved this success without
significant market support from broadcasters. The broadcasters traded
their support for ATSC/HDTV for a DTV transition designed to add
significant life to the real cash cow - NTSC.
Regards
Craig
Regards
Craig
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