MPEG's "father" unsure of DTV, Eisner's new stand, Diller pro-regulation.

"You gotta go!" urged NAB, and, in an attempt to lure the international audiovisual industry to Las Vegas for the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention held last month, it called more than 50 top-level executives as speakers. Among them: FCC president Michael Powell; Disney's Michael Eisner; Real Network's Ron Glaser and USA Interactive's Barry Diller.

And to add value, two sessions tracked world TV: "International Broadcast Developments" and "Digital Television Around the World."

Deregulation, or better yet, regulation, was on everyone's mind. NAB president Edward O. Fritts stated: "NAB has never sought wholesale deregulation of broadcasting. To the contrary, we recognize there is truly a unique role played by local broadcasters in communities all over America."

USA Interactive's Barry Diller was even more forceful: "[Deregulation] has taken broadcasters further and further from their original public service mandate. The big, bad truth is that the four networks have reconstituted themselves into the oligopoly the FCC originally set out to curb in the 1960s.... The path to change lies through more regulations, nor less. [But] no one is complaining loudly [because] the circle of control is too small."

Diller's remarks prompted a "nonsense" editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal daily, since regulations would affect its parent company's media ownership. According to the paper, regulation "is fiction" and has stifled the development of new technologies.

Fielding tough questions about deregulation during a breakfast session, FCC chairman Michael Powell said, "We should not look to eliminate all the rules; we never said we were out to eliminate all the rules. To do so would be irresponsible."

Addressing about 1,300 broadcasters during a luncheon, Walt Disney's Michael Eisner said that Disney plans to push digital technologies that will again revolutionize broadcasting.

Disney's ABC TV network already broadcasts its entire primetime lineup in HDTV. Later this year, Disney will test Movie Beam, a VOD service via broadcast signals. Plus, in an apparent shift from Disney's previous stance, Eisner said: "Every time a new entertainment technology has emerged, it has revealed itself to be a great source of opportunity to those that embrace it... If we don't provide our product [in a digital form] to the consumer in a timely manner, the pirates will do it for us."

However, another prominent speaker, Leonardo Chiariglione of Italy's Telecom Labs, was less optimistic about digital television. Considered the father of MPEG, Chiariglione opened two conferences, on Sunday and Monday, with speeches on broadcast engineering, and MPEG and convergence.

Chiariglione stressed the fact that the digital TV industry should reject its narrow-minded selfishness" to concentrate on a "broad-minded selfishness." He explained that right now digital television only works in a monopolistic environment, which is not a desirable situation. To be successful, he said, digital TV should mimic terrestrial analog TV, in the sense that it should not seek to acquire viewers, but to serve its coverage area and motivate the audience to pay for content. "Why are DVDs so much more successful than digital TV? Because the DVD player was conceived with an open standard," Chiariglione answered himself.

Moving onto his conference on MPEG compression -- the "heart" of any digital TV device -- Chiariglione said that the committee jumped from MPEG-4 to MPEG-7 to 21 because "when we jump, we jump big." Chiariglione further explained that MPEG-4 is for Internet, MPEG-7 makes contents "searchable" and MPEG-2 1, an open universal system, is the solution for digital TV. MPEG-21 is "read" by all machines, like a DVD player. It's then up to the users to choose the content. MPEG-21 is composed of 12 elements" and, for now, three are standardized - enough to permit open set-top boxes to "really" launch digital television.

This NAB was characterized by four elements: video production (now entirely digital), high definition cinema, video integration with the Internet and new digital video cameras: one by Sony using blue laser discs, and one by Panasonic using no-moving-parts memory cards for storage. A new digital U.S. TV transmission system from Microsoft was also introduced at the market. The system should solve all the reception problems created by the current modulation in ATSC, the standard for U.S. terrestrial digital television.

Out of the total of 2,115 NAB exhibitors, 225 represented the digital broadcasting sector followed by video production equipment companies. Some 100 exhibitors were from the streaming media industry. Indeed, the most crowded place was the multimedia hall, considering that the broadcasters' focus is now on IP technologies. Over 92,000 participants flocked to Las Vegas for the event, which overtook the entire Las Vegas Convention Center, including the new South Hall wing, making the total exhibit space 186,000 square meters.

Finally, NAB reflected some optimism. Broadcasters are starting to make money again, upfront advertising sales look promising and technology is cutting costs. In effect, the future is back.