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

  • From: Tom Barry <trbarry@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:54:37 -0500



John Shutt wrote:
> But I wonder if there would be anti-trust issues if all broadcasters in
> a market pooled their 'bits' for a 30 channel service?
>
Why would pooling anything help anyway? Unless you mean for a pay premium service? But that would in turn probably require copy protection which would then mean there are currently no receivers out there that could receive it.
I think free OTA still has a decent chance to be useful but copy protected pay OTA would face large investments and a long uphill battle unless it had some very prime content. (HBO, Showtime, ESPN?)
All those increasingly ubiquitous and price declining integrated HDTV receivers would be useless for the new service and I don't think many folks would be willing to buy yet another STB after having just gotten over the current dtv transition. After the transition there will probably be well less than 10% of households nationwide relying solely on an antenna (my wild guess). Out of that 10% (whatever) self selecting group how many want to pay for a premium service? I don't think they would be in that group if they did.
Or did you mean for a free non-copy-protected advertising supported service? Or maybe only premium mobile where new receivers may be needed anyway? 

- Tom (who likes free OTA)




----- Original Message ----- From: "Craig Birkmaier" <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
Sorry Bert, but you are wrong. If HD is included in the mix the number of SD channels (or their quality) is significantly reduced. You are well aware of this based on all of your posts regarding the issues that the UK is facing relative to adding HD to the Freeview mix.
The UK is dealing with their issue by using H.264 compression for HD, something not available to the ATSC in 1994.
You yourself keep saying that the emission standard does not need to be the same as the acquisition standard. Early on we did some sneaky tests on our digital channel, back when the one viewer didn't care, and for most programming 480p widescreen looked just as good as 1080i, when viewed on a high def receiver (professional CRT monitor at that time.)
In spite of this, we eventually settled on 720p emission for our HD service. Fox also figured out that people were more interested in the name HD than the actual images they saw, so they too eventually switched from 480p to 720p.
But I wonder if there would be anti-trust issues if all broadcasters in a market pooled their 'bits' for a 30 channel service? 

John




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