[opendtv] Re: News: Reps. Barton, Stearns Offer Alternative DTV Bill

  • From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 11:14:20 -0500

At 3:41 PM -0500 2/3/09, Mark A. Aitken wrote:
ATSC certainly is neither closed door nor is it anything but consensus driven. The question is more a question of who is involved (and when), and whether those with "direct and material interest" are taking their seat at the table t0o drive the required consensus. I suggest that most Broadcasters never took their seat at the table when it mattered most (by and large thinking their interests were being looked after by others). They are paying for that now.
At the same time, Broadcasters are NOW at the table, and for that reason, I believe ATSC Mobile DTV WILL be a success. 

I generally agree with Mark's position here.
To be fair, I was able to participate in several ATSC specialist groups over the years before they instituted the $500 per year fee for participation as a non-voting observer. Unfortunately, none of this came to a good end. There was no problem with the committee process being open to all; achieving consensus was quite another matter. And even when it was achieved, the parent Technology Group had to approve the proposals of the specialist groups. It was not uncommon for work to be elevated to the Technology Group, only to be voted down, and in some critical cases, the Technology Group's just made the key decisions.
As a case in point, Mark Schubin worked in a specialist group that recommended that Table 3 be amended to allow for SDTV formats with 720 active samples per line (the ATSC Standard specifies 704). This would have brought Table 3 into line with the ISO/MPEG Main Profile @ Main Level for MPEG-2 which requires support for 720 sample per line to be conformant with the MPEG-2 standard.
The Parent committee overruled the specialist group, based in the fact that ONE company had sold decoders that would crash if presented with MPEG-2 conformant bit streams with 720 samples per line. MPEG itself was not immune to this kind of "ignorance" on the part of those implementing the standard. I was involved in an effort to use a reserved extension to signal breaks in the 3:2 pulldown sequence on 24P bit streams; The Japanese National Committee vetoed this simple enhancement to the standard because some of its members had hard coded the reserved extensions in a manner that would cause the decoder to break if the extension were used.
But no abuse was greater than what happened when the SDTV formats were added to the ATSC standard in 1995. The process began quietly with a specialist group formed to determine the formats to add. The formation of this group was not announced to the public or members of the Advisory Committee On Advanced Television Services. But its existence eventually became public knowledge, and at the last moment the ATSC issued an invitation to a meeting to make presentations and recommendations about the inclusion of SDTV. This turned out to be nothing more than a PR stunt - the Technology Group met during lunch the first day and came back with their "consensus" agreement, which entrenched interlaced SDTV into the standard.
What is important to remember here is that this is all about compensation for intellectual property. The ability to get the U.S. government to mandate the IP for the standard AND THEN to mandate its use in every new TV receiver is the bottom line that was in play here. The real power resided in the Grand Alliance, which made the decisions regarding who would be in the patent pool. The ATSC and ACATS just provided the framework within which all of this could be done "legally."
The original goals of the ATSC have more than been met. The CEA estimated that 32 million DTV receivers would be sold in 2008, and this number did not include convertor boxes. The ATSC will easily collect royalties on more than 100,000,000 devices, if it has not done so already. This represents potentially billions in royalty revenue assuming that the royalty per set is in excess of $15 as has been reported over the years.
Everything else, including the M/H standard that Mark played such a key role in bringing to fruition is gravy... 

Regards
Craig


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