The Future History of Television.

Broadcasters won the battle for digital TV with an obsolete standard, but a studios-supported TV format could replace ATSC and DVB 

After winning the battle over the high definition TV standard, American broadcasters lost the war for the television system for the second millennium. Let's see how this evolved.

Years ago, Japanese companies decided to dominate the world's future television technology by inventing high definition television. In 1981, Japan's public broadcaster NHK demonstrated the 1,125-line HDTV system in San Francisco.

This larger, brighter and better television system created a brouhaha that slowly awakened Americans and Europeans. At first, Americans did not care about high definition television: it was viewed as a consumer gadget. After all, U.S. companies had ceased manufacturing television sets long ago. At most, Americans could sell old movies to the Japanese for the new television system.

Europe -- which didn't have any movies to sell but needed to protect its television set manufacturers from the Japanese -- rushed to develop its own HDTV technology, and in 1986, a European consortium came out with HD-Mac. Both the Japanese HDTV system, called Muse, and the European HD-Mac relied on analog technology compatible with existing television standards. However, the added HDTV video information required the use of another transmission channel.

Meanwhile, in 1985, Motorola asked the FCC, the U.S. telecommunications regulator, for permission to use American television channels that weren't being utilized by broadcasters for mobile phones. Worried about the danger of losing something valuable, the National Association of Broadcasters found in HDTV technology an excuse to not relinquish control of its terrestrial television frequencies to the phone companies.

Something of the sort had occurred in Japan with NHK. The Japanese network had invented HDTV in order to make itself indispensable and avoid losing the $2 billion in annual subsidies it was receiving from the Japanese government.

At that time, it looked as if Americans had no other choice but to use the well-developed Japanese HDTV technology, thus fulfilling a Japanese dream. Unfortunately, it was also a time when American politicians, FCC officials and television industry leaders were very concerned with what was viewed as Japan Inc., or Japan's plans of hegemony.

In 1986, in an attempt to gain support from both the FCC and the politicians, U.S. broadcasters formed a committee called the ACTV, the goal of which was to develop an American HDTV system that would not only compete with existing systems, but would also establish American leadership in the new field.

Europe had already invested some $400 million in the development of Eureka's HD-Mac project. The Japanese had not only spent $350 million, but also had assigned an impressive group of 200 engineers to Muse.

By promoting HDTV as the fight for world technological dominance versus acquiescence, American broadcasters convinced the U.S. Department of Defense (called DARPA, which also contributed to the development of the Internet) to provide $33 million to funding the initial research of high definition television.

In 1987, the Sarnoff laboratory (which had developed the NTSC color TV system) suggested using an HDTV standard that would be compatible with traditional television transmissions but would occupy only one channel. Although laudable, this proposal countered the broadcasters' need for two channels. A solution came with Zenith's proposal to "digitize" the television signal so that it would occupy only one channel. However, as the signal was not compatible with NTSC, a second channel was needed for the digital TV simulcast.

Declaring digital television as the future for American television, the FCC approved the new HDTV technology that was officially proposed by the ACTV consortium in 1987. Even though the ACTV committee was controlled by European companies (like Thomson and Philips), developments on HD-Mac continued until February 1993, when the European consortium decided to switch to digital technology (after having spent more than $2 million in European government and industry funds) and formed the DVB committee, which is now based in Geneva, Switzerland. One year later, the Japanese dropped Muse in favor of a digital HDTV system.

On November 28, 1995, the FCC approved a new HDTV system proposed by ATSC (the renamed ACTV consortium). This system was in effect a multistandard, since various committee members couldn't agree on all of the requirements. Therefore, if in the past the analog TV world was divided into three standards (NTSC, PAL and SECAM), the digital TV universe would be divided into only two -- ATSC and the European DVB. Both are based on digital technology and use MPEG video compression, however ATSC uses Dolby sound compression and DVB uses MPEG sound compression. In addition, for terrestrial transmission ATSC uses a single modulation, while DVB uses multiple modulations.

With digital technology entering the world of television, it was inevitable that computer hardware manufacturers and the software industry would stake its claims. Indeed, American broadcasters had been pitted against the computer industry since 1993, when the latter started insisting on progressive scanning (used by computers) instead of interlaced scanning (used by TV sets). Leveraging the fact that the computer industry made their units obsolete at a rapid pace, the broadcasters refuted the computer industry's demands.

At the same time, the U.S. cable TV industry made it clear to broadcasters that it was not going to give a full channel to HDTV, since it was not part of the FCC'S "must carry" rule. After some legal maneuvering, the cable TV operators ceded only part of the digital channel (something like five megabytes of space instead of the 19 megabytes that a six-megahertz channel could carry). This further upset the broadcaster's plans, since the new strategy it had adopted was to shun high definition in favor of multiplexing up to five digital TV channels into one HDTV channel.

As a final analysis, the American broadcasters, in order to protect its interests, stepped first on the toes of the phone companies, then the computer sector, later, the cable TV industry and, as explained below, those of the production companies.

By November 1, 1998, 42 U.S. television stations were transmitting HDTV signals. In April 1999, only 15,000 American households are equipped to watch a high-definition television broadcast.

The future for HDTV broadcast doesn't look bright. High definition television only makes sense for expensive big-screen sets, which are unfit for where most viewers watch TV: the kitchen and the bedroom. Also, viewers have no incentive to purchase a digital analog converter, since that can only offer them programming that they can already get in analog form. Broadcasters have invested so much money in digital technology that they don't want to pay more for new programming designed to encourage consumers to buy new television sets or digital-analog converters.

For all intents and purposes, the digital terrestrial standard (submitted by the broadcasters) that the FCC approved is already obsolete. That's why America's public television network, PBS, started experimenting with digital terrestrial broadcasts with an Internet protocol. If digital transmissions were also available through computers, broadcasters would instantly have access to a larger built-in audience. In addition, the Internet-based protocol would stimulate sales of digital TV converters, since such boxes would give television sets access to the Web via a standard telephone line initially and later, Internet access would be provided by a wireless return channel.

In addition to the 1994 development of Web technology, what contributed to the demise of the ATSC standard was the 1996 Telecommunications Act. This reform, which was strongly lobbied by U.S. television stations, intended to give broadcasters control over programming and vertical integration capabilities. However, instead of taking over the television process (production and distribution), broadcasters succumbed to the studios, proving in America that content is king. Today, four of the six major networks are owned by studios. The studios also own most of the major U.S. cable-TV networks and are at the forefront in developing Web content for the Internet.

All of these factors established the groundwork for the creation in 1998 of an international consortium to develop a digital TV standard based on Internet protocol, otherwise known as the Oregon-based Advanced Television Enhanced Forum (ATVEF). This forum is composed of representatives from more than 20 companies, including Disney, Warner Bros., Microsoft, Sony, CityTV (Canada), Cable Labs, Cable & Wireless (U.K.), DirecTV, The Fantastic Corp. (Switzerland) and PBS. For similar reasons, some U.S. broadcasters, like NBC, are spearheading an enhanced broadcast research effort.

With the backing of the U.S. studios and its networks, plus the backing of the U.S. computer industry and international companies, it is almost certain that ATVEF, or a comparable system, will eventually replace the ATSC and DVB standards, so that the world will have one digital TV protocol open to future upgrades without tendering old systems obsolete.