Digital TV Launch Signals Triumph of Technology Over Political Wrangling
If there is a lesson in the long and byzantine history of digital television, it is this: Be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it.
In the late 1980s, the National Assn. of Broadcasters began the movement that eventually led to digital television, claiming that the survival of free broadcasting depended on the creation of expanded TV services.
The federal government quickly latched on to the concept, transforming it into a crusade to protect American television manufacturers from Japanese rivals.
But today, after more than a decade of wrangling, the hype has begun to fade as broadcasters confront the sobering reality of the complexity and the expense--about $5 million per station--of making the shift from analog to digital. And as for the television manufacturers that the government sought to protect, the last two--Zenith and RCA--were bought by overseas companies during the long development of digital television.
What began as a protectionist move has become, at least in this awkward early phase of digital transition, a kind of albatross around the necks of the victors.
Even for the public, which is supposed to be the ultimate beneficiary of the DTV movement, the start of digital broadcasting on Nov. 1 was largely a yawner, since no one--except the few who paid the excruciatingly high price for a digital television set--could even see the images.
But for all its shortcomings, digital TV one day is likely to be as revolutionary as was the move years ago to digitize text, which led to the computerization of society and the new methods of communications provided by the Internet. The flexibility of the digital TV signal has opened a range of possibilities that few of its creators imagined.
First Proposals Weren’t Digital
In many ways, the story of digital television is about the triumph of ingenious technology over the political goals of the people who invented it.
In fact, the first proposals for advanced television weren’t even digital. It began with a push from the National Assn. of Broadcasters for analog high-definition television. The association was locked in a battle with mobile radio makers, who wanted the Federal Communications Commission to hand over a swath of vacant UHF bandwidth so it could be used by two-way radios. The NAB was on the verge of losing the battle when it hit upon the idea of high-definition TV, which, because of its superior resolution, would require two combined channels to broadcast.
“It is a fact that consumers will be able to enjoy this improved broadcast technology in the near future,” NAB President Edward Fritts said in 1987. “The question is whether the FCC will let them.”
The association put on several demonstrations of analog HDTV using the only equipment available at the time, from the Japanese television maker NHK. The sight of Japanese equipment in this advanced realm was enough to launch the HDTV issue into the political arena. The campaign suddenly focused on protecting American television makers, who seemed on the verge of being trounced in the race to produce advanced TV.
Breakthrough Puts U.S. Ahead
American researchers were hopelessly behind their Japanese and European counterparts in the development of HDTV until late 1990, when General Instrument announced a breakthrough that would forever change the landscape. While most companies, including those in Japan and Europe, had focused on analog HDTV, General Instrument announced that it had found a way to transmit a high-definition digital image. The trick was figuring out how to compress a huge digital bitstream to a size that would fit within the 6 megahertz of a UHF channel.
General Instrument’s breakthrough suddenly propelled the United States far into the lead on creating an HDTV standard, since digital not only enabled transmission free of the usual ghosting and interference of analog broadcasts but created a variety of possibilities that relied on the flexibility of digital systems.
The digital stream of ones and zeros was so easy to manipulate that transmissions could be configured in numerous ways. For example, a station could choose to broadcast one high-definition channel, or it could take its 6-megahertz band and split it into several lower-resolution channels.
The development was so overwhelming that in just a few years, Japan’s Post and Telecommunications Ministry conceded defeat by announcing it was abandoning its analog system in favor of digital.
The digital standard for television was adopted by the FCC in 1996. By that time, RCA had been sold to Thomson of France and Zenith to South Korea’s Goldstar.
What has replaced the political slogans is a scramble over how to best exploit the medium. The impact of this digital revolution on broadcasters is hard to gauge since their plans are so vague. They had built their political movement on the idea that the public absolutely needed HDTV. But so far the masses have barely weighed in on the issue. Television apparently is still acceptable even if you can’t see every blade of grass on a football field.
The broadcasters have begun to tone down their high-definition slogans and talk more about multi-casting--the splitting of a single channel in several separate standard-definition digital broadcasts.
Multicasting is sensible from a technological standpoint. The digital standard allows many different formats--from standard definition, which is about the same as current television, to high-definition, which uses more than twice the number of scan lines to construct an image.
The Public Must Decide
As the price of digital televisions begin to fall, the idea of high-definition broadcasts will certainly become more compelling to the public. But it may be just one of several factors that shape television in the future.
Perhaps the public will find it preferable to have more channels to compute on their televisions or view programming on demand.
No one is entirely certain what the killer app of digital television will be. But after all the years of debate between politicians and engineers, it is finally up to the public to be the arbiters of the new technology.
Times staff writer Ashley Dunn can be reached via e-mail at ashley.dunn@latimes.com.
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Digital Debuts
The 22 cities where TV stations began broadcasting digital signals in November:
Atlanta
Boston
Charlotte, N.C.
Cincinnati
Columbus, Ohio
Dallas
Detroit
Harrisburg, Pa.
Honolulu
Houston
Indianapolis
Los Angeles Miami
Madison, Wis.
Milwaukee
New York
Philadelphia
Portland, Ore.
Raleigh, N.C.
San Francisco
Seattle
Washington
*
Sources: National Assn. of Braodcasters, Associated Press
