Date: Thur, 18 Jan 2007 04:32:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: January 18





                                  SuitWatch -- January 18, 2007
 ______________________________________________________


 From Broadcasting to Placecasting

   At the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show all the TV manufacturers I spoke to
   made one fact clear: the "new TV" would be a 1920 x 1080 screen like the
   ones we use for computers, but optimized for television. That means it would
   also have HDMI and component video connections and tuners for cable and
   over-the-air digital signals, both of which might come in any of 18
   different ATSC (Advanced Television System Committee) formats. Picture
   scanning would be progressive rather than interlaced.

   Never mind that computer screens commonly come in resolutions upward of 1920
   x 1080. TV screen makers would plateau their offerings at 1080p and make
   other improvements from there.

   Specifically, they predicted that 1080p screens
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080p) would be available at Costco for
   under $2000 by the end of the year, and that 1080i camcorders would be down
   around $1000. They also said full 1080p camcorders would start showing up in
   professional gear, but would take longer to come down in price.

   Because of predictions like those, the flat-screen bracket over the
   fireplace in our new house remained empty for almost two years. That ended
   last November .when we bought a new 40" Sony KDL-40XBR2 Bravia screen from
   Amazon for $2299. No tax, no shipping charges. A few places charged less,
   but I'd never heard of them, and my experience with Amazon (which runs
   nearly everything on Linux) has been excellent over the years. (I don't want
   to check, but I'm sure the price on our unit has continued to sink.)

   I decided to take the plunge after spending a couple nights at the house of
   a friend whose 46" version of the same screen also doubles as a computer
   display. He'd sit on his easy chair and control his screen with either a
   remote control or a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. (I mentioned this back in
   the November 14 SuitWatch.) We're not that fancy yet at our house, but I
   have tried hooking a computer up to the screen, and the results are
   startling -- mostly because photographs look much better than any of the HD
   content coming in over TV channels. The resolutions are higher to begin
   with, and the images are far less compressed.

   TV still has advantages, of course. The main one is that we still like what
   we can only get easily from TV stations and networks: movies, sports, and
   programs of various kinds. That's why nearly all of us have continued to put
   up with the 540-line NTSC and 576-line PAL systems that have been around for
   decades. And we still watch SD on HD screens, because that's most of what's
   still out there, and ... well, what else are we gonna do? We gotta watch TV,
   right?

   Compared to SD, HD is pure Deliverance. More than one friend has called the
   difference "life-changing". Some forms of programming -- notably sports,
   music videos and nature footage -- are so good, relatively speaking, that
   they're hard not to watch. At first.

   But soon enough, you start picking nits. Every HD picture is plagued by MPEG
   compression artifacts: folds, quilting, blocking, mosquito noise... We get
   our HD from Dish Network, which currently offers about 30 HD channels, not
   counting the premium and PPV ones we don't bother with. I've compared the
   picture we get with the cable pictures I see in friends houses and in
   stores, and there's no doubt that satellite is better. The system is
   all-digital and compresses its signals far less than cable does. But still,
   it does compress the pictures. A lot.

   And every time they add more channels, they compress the pictures more. I
   noticed that problem even on our 16-year-old Sony Trinitron, back when Dish
   began adding channels. At one point I put a roof antenna up to check the
   difference between the "pure digital" channels from the satellite and direct
   over-the-air analog channels from local stations carrying the same
   programming. The over-the-air pictures were much better, simply because they
   had no compression artifacts. In fact, watching them brought a sense of
   relief. "Look: the sky is pure blue, not some kind of blue plaid!"

   Now analog TV is worse than terminal. It's condemned. By 2009, every station
   in the U.S. is required to abandon its legacy channel on VHF or UHF and fire
   up a new digital transmitter on a new channel inside the UHF band. In Los
   Angles, KCBS is moving from Channel 2 to Channel 60. KCOP is moving from
   Channel 13 to Channel 65. KTLA is moving from Channel 5 to Channel 31. While
   these are still channels in the sense that they correspond to a frequency,
   they're actually just chunks of spectrum reserved for whatever the station
   wants to put there. A digital station facility can actually broadcast a
   number of different program streams simultaneously (up to four, I think),
   plus data streams of various kinds, inside its spectral chunk.

   Part of the FCC's idea here is to advantage terrestrial over-the-air
   television, which doesn't need to compress its signals -- at least not as
   far as those signals get compressed inside ever-more-congested cable and
   satellite digital data streams. But in practice, so far, what I've seen from
   over-the-air signals isn't impressive.

   We live high on a hillside in Santa Barbara, yet we are not within sight of
   any digital TV station transmitter. Our clearest shot at any transmitters,
   it turns out, is across the Pacific toward San Diego and Tijuana, two
   hundred miles away. With our new high-gain Winegard UHF antenna pointed that
   direction, we get a nice bunch of digital signals. KGTV, a CBS affiliate
   better known as Channel 10, radiates its digital signal on Channel 25, along
   with a second "station" called Tube. KPBS, the PBS affiliate best known as
   Channel 15, radiates its digital signal on Channel 30, and adds a second
   "station" called "Create".

   On New Years Day we watched the Rose Bowl on KGTV, occasionally interrupted
   by signal losses that are common in winter here -- at least when you're
   dealing with UHF frequencies bending across 200 miles of slowly curving
   water. (Here's a photo set of the whole exercise:
   http://flickr.com/photos/docsearls/sets/72157594453965824/.)

   With digital signals, the loss is much more binary than with analog. There's
   no snowy reception or gradual fading as the signal weakens. Instead the
   receiver works to keep the picture together with decreasing amounts of data.
   The result at first is something that looks like abstract art or one of
   those old screen savers that divides your picture into squares and starts
   re-arranging them. Then the signal goes away and the receiver thows a "lost
   signal" error message on the screen. Our Dish Network receiver, which also
   gets the over-the-air channels, can also display signal strength on the
   screen. When it gets down to "60" (not sure what that number means, but at
   least it's consistent), watch out. Above that, you're fine. (By the way, at
   CES I got some hang time with the SiliconDust people. These are Linux
   fanatics who make what looks like a real fine over-the-air digital TV
   receiver that can serve your TV or hour home computers directly or through a
   LAN. Check 'em out at http://www.silicondust.com/.)

   After awhile, if you're a digitally-oriented techie, you start to sense how
   silly it all is. Few people watch more than two channels at a time (usually
   recording one while watching another), meaning most of the data streamed to
   us is wasted, making the compression of what we see even more annoying.
   Notions like "station" and "channel" seem quaint and antique. And the Net
   blew away distance a long time ago. Why shouldn't any of us be able to get
   our home town stations anywhere? Sling Media (http://slingmedia.com) has
   already made a lot of hay working around that particular bottleneck.

   Hey, why even bother with transmitters any more? Why not just put it all on
   the Net and watch what you want, when you want it. Or produce what you want,
   when and where you want it? These are questions both history and the
   marketplace are asking.

   The answer, of course, is that the flywheels of business-as-usual are huge.
   Same goes for the economics involved in making changes are non-trivial for
   the stations. On the one hand stations losing advertising revenue to a
   jillion other alternatives. On the other hand digital equipment is still
   very expensive. In many cases the equipment is far more expensive than
   stations can afford. So on their HD channels they'll carry HD programming
   from the network, then drop down to SD for news and other local programming.

   I learned about the stations' problems from my friend Terry Heaton
   (http://www.thepomoblog.com), a veteran local TV executive and a
   consultant of high standing in the business. He tells me neither the
   viewership nor the economics of local over-the-air HD are there yet. Not
   enough, at least, even to justify experiments that might give stations a
   jump on whatever direction the market may end up going.

   So I had an idea for him, which he liked and said he'd pass along to the
   stations. Here it is: put locally produced amateur high-def productions on
   one or more of the secondary channels. People are starting to use high-def
   camcorders, and to produce high-def videos. More and more people are going
   to want to start sharing those, but won't be able to fight the slow upstream
   bottlenecks that their local cableco or telco has provisioned for their
   Internet service. But the TV stations have the bandwidth, at least on the
   downstream side.

   The first place to bet here is with the young folks. High school and college
   kids. Next is the "placebloggers" who are also becoming placecasters. The
   stations should open a channel to broadcast whatever legal stuff these folks
   want to come up with. There are administrative and electronic costs, but few
   if any costs for expensive new "professional" gear. Hey, why not?

   By the way, professional gear took a big jump downward at CES, where a
   company called Red showed off a cinema-grade digital film camera that
   essentially makes 35mm-grade cinematography available in digital form at
   prices independent producers can afford. It shoots with a 4520 x 2540
   resolution (2540 progressive) at 60 frames per second RAW, using a
   12-megapixel Mysterium CMOS sensor. It's flexible, format-agnostic, and
   costs $17,500. For something this good, that's cheap. Find them at
   http://red.com.

   This year at CES I didn't have time to get over to the main hall, where all
   the latest big screens and related gear were being shown off. I trusted that
   the plateau was doing its job. And I figured the action wasn't there anyway.
   It was out among the crowd we used to call "consumers". More and more of
   them are producers now. Some of them are placeblogging:
   http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/01/hyperlocal_cont.html. Some of them are
   placecasters. It would be wise for stations to get friendly with both.

     -- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with
     the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and
     a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
     University.
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