[opendtv] Re: TV Technology: Harmonic Boosts OTT Delivery With New EyeQ Video Compression Optimization Solution
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2016 06:07:55 +0000
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
You got it exactly backwards Bert. Pay TV was the first real
competition to the FOTA monopoly,
FOTA wasn't a monopoly, and with UHF, it could have been even more competitive.
Pay TV created the monopolies, in each neighborhood, with the walled-in sports
channels as the bait. Until another medium came along that could offer even
more choice, and finally we can have more choice plus competition, instead of
having to choose one or the other (thanks to net neutrality). Amazing how that
worked out, eh? You seem to be protesting too much about this state of affairs.
FOTA TV is no more free that the Interstate highway system.
Enough with the banalities. Surely you must sense when you're just repeating
the same stuff we've heard for years, and that has already been responded to?
For several decades there were no tuner mandates,
Let me explain how this works, then, Craig. For several decades, the only
option was NTSC. That was the standard, and the incumbent, so no mandate from
the government was needed. Then with UHF, in order to get the ball rolling,
since VHF was the incumbent, there had to be a tuner mandate. With ATSC, same
thing. With FM radio in cars, same thing (finally!). Digital radio? Without a
tuner mandate, it's extremely slow going. On the other hand, it's not spectrum
that is high demand, so the government doesn't need to care. Which means, we'll
be using AM and FM for who knows how long.
Moral being, you don't need a mandate when you're the first standard on a
medium. You also don't need a mandate if the resource you're using is not
public property and scarce, like the higher RF spectrum. The government didn't
need to mandate IPv4. It uses non-public owned infrastructure, and it was the
incumbent. But notice how IPv6, already been around 20+ years, is extremely
slow going. It doesn't matter to the government, so there is no need to force a
transition.
Truth is, by the time the ATSC transmitters were all turned on, more
than 90% of U.S. Homes CHOSE to subscribe to a pay TV service.
It's true that getting digital TV going was really slow. (And that people such
as you-know-who wanted to make it even slower.) But guess what, Craig? See how
you just now said over 90%? It's already under 70% now, in just a couple of
years, maybe three. And a large part of that is that we have ATSC tuners in
every TV set. It has allowed people to make that decision, without impediments
by special interests. ATSC, plus the Internet, improved the situation for
consumers. For always inexplicable reasons, this also grates Craig no end. Had
there been no tuner mandate, we would have seen the same kind of collusion we
see now, with those proprietary little streaming boxes you like. (Can you
receive Yahoo View yet, Craig?)
But most important, we understood that we were entering a period of
rapid innovation driven by Moore's Law.
And you cluelessly kept repeating that ATSC was a point solution, instead of,
if anything at all, lobbying the CE companies to make their sets upgradeable.
The simple fact is that you pointed in the wrong direction. And don't forget
that I've been explaining this to your forever. I explained to you how ATSC 1.0
could handle any new formats you cared to name.
And more, you got hung up on a really minor point, Table 3 for heaven's sake.
This odd notion that this one table was ordained from on high and couldn't be
changed. ATSC 1.0 can easily, trivially easily, be made to support any other
table of formats, Craig, even 4K. At the time, it simply DID NOT MATTER. You
made a mountain out of a molehill, and the standard was never the issue. Too
blunt? Repetition causes this.
Bert
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:
- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at
FreeLists.org
- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word
unsubscribe in the subject line.
Other related posts:
