Re: HDTV

[Garrett Wollman <wollman>]

<<On Fri, 25 Dec 1998 16:48:19 +0000, Dan Strassberg <dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net> said:

> The modulation schemes specified for the over-the-air terrestrial
> transmissions and the cable transmissions are different, and there
> is no obvious technical reason why the cable-system operators could
> not have adopted the over-the-air standard. 

For those cable systems which use Zenith converter hardware, that
company is making an add-in card (presumably to be rented to the
customer at an exorbitant fee) which will translate 64-QAM to 8-VSB.
(Presumably the MPEG-2 data stream is already in ATSC format, so it's
just the modulation that needs translation; otherwise, the
metainformation would need to be converted from one format to
another.  EchoStar, the operator behind ``the Dish Network'', uses the
European-standard DVB protocol; I suspect some of the cable systems do
as well.)

I've only seen the Panasonic products so far; one of these days I'll
have to make my way down to see the Sony.  Panasonic's receiver is a
two-component system: there is a $5000 16x9 video monitor (``HDTV
Compatible''), and a separate $1500 ATSC tuner/decoder which outputs
analog Y-Cb-Cr video as well as NTSC baseband so it can be used with
normal TVs and VCRs.  The decoder also has an IEEE 1394 connection,
intended to connect to a digital VCR (which is not available yet
because of production difficulties) or home computer.

> My hunch is that this is a bid to push over-the-air TV aside and to
> make cable (plus satellite in remote areas) the only means of
> delivering TV signals to US households.

The cable companies rightly see digital TV as a threat because in a
digital TV world, the popular, mass-appeal services could be
distributed more efficiently via broadcast, which would leave many
people with no reason to subscribe to cable at all.

- -GAWollman

- --
Garrett A. Wollman   | O Siem / We are all family / O Siem / We're all the same
wollman@lcs.mit.edu  | O Siem / The fires of freedom 
Opinions not those of| Dance in the burning flame
MIT, LCS, CRS, or NSA|                     - Susan Aglukark and Chad Irschick

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