[opendtv] Re: Technology years
- From: "Bob Miller" <robmxa@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2007 00:01:39 -0500
On 1/19/07, Albert Manfredi <bert22306@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dale Kelly wrote:
>1. There would be no US based standards committee to place
>a strangle hold on the process. DVB would generally be the
>world wide standard, were North America in the fold.
>
>2. Without the ATSC standard to manipulate, those who
>would and do, strangle OTA, would not gain traction; having
>little under their control to provide cover.
>
>3. Receivers could not be introduced into the US market with
>bugs installed nor could artificial shortages be introduced. With
>the worldwide availability of so many functional and relatively
>inexpensive receivers, the CE/Subscription TV/Electronics
>Store cabal would simply loose control. This stuff would be
>available everywhere.
>
>4. Their ability to select and then control this unique and
>once very fragile ATSC standard has given them the cover to
>nearly complete the creation of the National Subscription
>Television System - NSTS. Soon known as: No Shiite, This
>Stinks!
Interesting points. You do seem to put a lot of weight on the potentially
negative impact the ATSC itself has on this sordid state of affairs. I'm not
sure that's entirely warranted.
To keep this as precisely comparable as possible, what makes Australian DTT
successful is already doable with ATSC as is. No need to rely on the ATSC
being overly clever about implementing E-VSB or A-VSB, for example. And the
Aussies stuck with 64-QAM, same as us (well, equivalent to us).
And yet, even when nothing of extraordinary insight is being asked of
anyone, hardware is still not available. I understand your points about
DVB-T hardware theoretically being harder to stop, but there's no reason in
the world to believe that plain old A/53 hardware should have been easy to
block either. For the basics, we don't need anything new. And the basics is
all any other country is using for their FOTA TV, for the time being.
Why aren't plain old 4th/5th gen ATSC STBs, PVRs, and DVDRs positively
oozing out of China? Available for direct purchase on web sites?
So I have a lot of faith that DVB-T hardware would also be blocked. The
salesmen would simply be telling us that there's no demand for DTT hardware
(adjusted for US 6 MHz channels), and you wouldn't see anything in stock.
How would they block and entity like USDTV from getting receivers from
say a Chinese manufacturer and giving them away? USDTV almost gave
their receivers away at $19.95, we always planned on giving ours away.
COFDM DVB-T receivers were already at a price range in 2000 to
contemplate giving them away.
A dozen entities like ours and USDTV would have been giving away DVB-T
receivers by 2003. The US with COFDM based modulation would have made
all other digital transitions including the UK's look like poor
imitations.
Virtually ALL HDTV sets being sold by 2003 would have included DVB-T
receivers, the people buying them would have known they were there.
There would have been no mandate or any need of one.
And virtually all HDTV sets being sold would have access to at least
ONE form of HDTV content, OTA. People would go home and plug in an
antenna FIRST thing. You would not have 60% of HD purchasers not
hooked up to any HD source of content.
We had 300 DVB-T receivers built by Nokia ready to distribute to the
movers and shakers in New York City, yes including the police and fire
departments, in early 2000. Some of those receivers were subsequently
taken out of inventory by Nokia to be used by the DoD, Sinclair and us
in the test that we did post 9/11, November 2001, on the digital
channel 25 in NYC at Ground Zero. They would have had those prototypes
16 months earlier with us using an experimental license if the
controversy had not irrupted. We did do the experimental license later
on channels 54 and 59 and did show it to the fire department which is
now following up with COFDM based initiative.
I think the DoD was interested in something called Homeland Security
in early 2000. It was a new concept then. They thought that maybe a
COFDM based system would work better in an emergency. We found that it
indeed would in November of 2001.
Bob Miller
Another parenthetical point is that some text in ATSC documents is just
policy statements, I believe. Like the business quoted by John Shutt. To me,
those are easily changed with the stroke of a pen.
For instance, IIRC, A/90 included some policy statement that any broadcast
TV streams would have to use MPEG-2 compression. But that wasn't a technical
limitation of A/90, just a policy statement, which was obsoleted with the
draft standards for AVC and VC-1. As far as I can tell.
Bert
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