paper

asher0411

spectrum03-hdtv.pdf

Home >Science homework help >paper

IE E

E S

P E

C T

R U

M •

Ju n

e 2

0 0

3 C

B S

N E W S A N A L Y S I S

HDTV—Ready for the Long Drive? Broadcasters and distributors are finally getting—and giving—the picture

CONSUMER • Nearly a decade after a “Grand Alliance” of electronics and R&D organizations came together at the behest of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to bring high-defini- tion television to the United States, HDTV seems poised at last to penetrate the U.S. mass market. Its advent has been predicted so many times in the past, often with breathless enthusiasm, that any claims made for it now are bound to meet with healthy skepticism. It has so far failed to meet every milestone set for its introduction, and the 2006 deadline for a complete switchover to HDTV threatens to be no exception.

And yet, a large number of basic fac- tors would seem to be combining to give HDTV the critical mass for liftoff: more programs, readiness of cable and satellite services to provide distribution, cheaper receivers, consumer-friendly regulation, and—not least—the immi-

nent arrival of the first DVD recorders capable of handling HDTV.

Most of those same factors that are visibly coming together in North America also should lift HDTV off the launch pads in Europe and Asia.

In April, in what was probably the largest HDTV production ever, CBS Sports set up 42 HDTV cameras to broadcast the 2003 U.S. Masters golf tournament live in Augusta, Ga. [see photographs, above]. The month before, ESPN launched a high-pro- file HDTV all-sports cable network. Mean- while, dot-com billionaire and Dallas Mav- ericks basketball team owner Mark Cuban has launched an HDTV cable network, HDNet, in which sports will be the emphasis—though Iraq coverage also fig- ured prominently in early offerings.

Other widely viewed cable networks, besides the sports specialists, also are boost- ing their mostly nonathletic offerings. Those include WB, the Discovery Chan-

nel, HBO, and Showtime. Most HBO and Showtime movies now are offered in the widescreen, high-resolution digital for- mat [see “What Is HDTV?” at http://www. spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/ jun03/hdtvsb.html].

Distribution infrastructure in place

The launch of the Grand Alliance system, and the introduction of similar systems in Europe and Asia, based generally on the MPEG-2 compression architectures, estab- lished the technical foundation for HDTV. But from the start, HDTV suffered from the chicken-and-egg problem that people weren’t going to buy expensive new re- ceivers until programmers and distributors were in a position to offer a lot of HD con- tent, and the programmers and distribu- tors weren’t going to offer content until consumers were in a position to get it.

Both aspects of that conundrum appear, at last, to be getting resolved.

A scene from the U.S. Masters golf tournament in the

16:9 high-definition television format.

Inset: Tiger Woods at the Masters, cropped to the 4:3

television format [picture superimposed by Spectrum].

Scores or player statistics could go in this space.

16:9

4:3

B R I E F S

ANTHRAX/SARS DECIPHERED. In one-

two punches, on 30 April and 1 May scien-

tific teams reported they had decoded

the genome of the anthrax bacterium

used in the 2001 bioterrorist attacks

against targets in the United States and

the genome of the SARS virus. Both analy-

ses focused on comparing the disease’s

genomes with genes from related species,

in order to zero in on what makes anthrax

and SARS so infectious and deadly.

EE UNEMPLOYMENT. Joblessness

among U.S. electrical engineers soared

to 7 percent in the first quarter of this

year, surpassing the national jobless rate

of 5.8 percent, according to the U.S.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a

marked jump from last year’s EE unem-

ployment rate of 4.2 percent, and may

represent a historic shift in engineering

employment. In the past, U.S. engineers

and scientists have typically enjoyed

lower jobless rates than average.

COLUMBIA REPORT. A group investigat-

ing the 1 February breakup of the Space

Shuttle Columbia produced a “working

scenario” on 6 May. It concluded that

superheated gases penetrated the shut-

tle’s left wing through a small hole in its

leading edge. In less than 15 seconds, the

gases melted the wing from the inside out,

sending the spacecraft spinning out of

control. The gases were allowed in by

damaged thermal panels on the wing.

What caused the damage that allowed

the gases in? "We were careful not to say

the foam caused a hole in the shuttle. But

that’s not to say we don’t believe that,"

said the panel’s chairman, retired U.S.

Navy Admiral Harold Gehman [above].

"The board is certainly suspicious that

foam had something to do with it."

—Samuel K. Moore, Jean

Kumagai, and Willie D. Jones

N E W S A N A L Y S I S IE

E E

S P

E C

T R

U M

• Ju

n e

2 0

0 3

Of the 1400 U.S. television stations, only about 800 can broadcast HDTV, but 113 of the top 119 major market stations are now able to “pass through” at least some of the digital programming that’s made avail- able to them by the networks, according to the FCC (Washington, D.C.). Meanwhile, “digital programming is up about 50 per- cent in prime time, compared to a year ago,” says Rick Chessen, chairman of the FCC’s digital television (DTV) task force.

The cost of outfitting even a single sta- tion for digital has been steep. “It’s mas- sively expensive,” says Dennis Wharton, senior vice president of communications of the National Association of Broadcast- ers (NAB, in Washington, D.C.). “We’re spending on average about [US] $2 mil-

lion to $4 million per station.” For a local station to originate programming in the HDTV format, “you’re talking about potentially $10 million per station,” according to Wharton.

Yet broadcasters and cable companies are coming to see substantial investments in HDTV infrastructure as worthwhile. In- Stat/MDR, the market research firm in Scottsdale, Ariz., reports that nearly 90 per- cent of U.S. cable operators responding to a recent survey said they now were equipped to provide two-way digital servic- es, allowing customers to custom-order content, including, of course, HD films. Video-on-demand and HDTV ranked as the new services most desired by customers.

A survey by the Consumer Electronics Association (Arlington, Va.), consistent with In-Stat’s, found that more than one- third of cable subscribers said they would be happy to pay more to obtain films in the HD format. “We’re starting to get into the stage now where there’s been enough high definition exposed to the public that there are people who are starting to demand it,”

comments Peter Symes (SM), engineer- ing vice president of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (White Plains, N.Y.).

Receivers better received, too

The other major obstacle to HDTV’s take- off has been the sticker shock and confu- sion suffered by even the few consumers willing, initially, to seriously explore dig- ital television. There’s been a dizzying array of receivers, including plasma and liquid-crystal display flat panels, projec- tion sets, and HDTV on direct-view CRTs—perhaps the best value right now.

Until recently, entry-level sets went for around $4000. But prices have come down rapidly in the past two years. Cathode-ray

TV sets of 34 inches made by Panasonic, Philips, Sony, and Toshiba sell for $1800–$2500 and have been well received by the consumer press. A healthy selection of smaller models from Zenith, Samsung, RCA, and Toshiba are available at prices from $750 to $1600, no longer requiring the farm to be sold to support the habit.

For those financially equipped for more luxurious viewing, manufactur- ers like NEC, Pioneer, and Matsushita are ramping up plasma-screen produc- tion rapidly. About 800 000 plasma flat panels shipped last year, selling generally for $4000–$5000. LCD flat- panel sales in the United States were 250 000–300 000 last year.

Even at prices that struck many con- sumers as outrageous to begin with, some so-called high-definition television sets have come without the tuners and de- coders required to receive and process HD signals. “People used to go to their Best Buy or Circuit City to buy a TV set sold and marketed as a digital TV set, but they would take it home and find they couldn’t

• About 1.5 million high-definition televi- sion receivers were sold in the United

States in 2001 at an average price of

US $1800, versus 26.5 million analog sets

• U.S. consumers bought about 2 million HDTV sets in 2002, and are expected to

buy about twice that many this year; sales

of analog sets are declining

• Even with sales doubling yearly, it would take five more years for half

of the TV sets owned by U.S. con-

sumers—about 270 million at present—

to be high definition

• An estimated 4.8 million U.S. homes were equipped with HDTV receivers at

the end of 2002

High-Definition Television in Perspective

U .S

. D E

P A

R T

M E

N T

O F

D E

F E

N S

IE E

E S

P E

C T

R U

M •

Ju n

e 2

0 0

S O F T WA R E • The server market appears to be locked in a three-way battle of operating systems, with Microsoft Win- dows, proprietary Unix variants, and fast- growing Linux duking it out. For Linux, most of that growth has come not from cutting into Microsoft territo- ry, but from cannibalizing the mar- ket share of Unixes sold by the likes of IBM, Sun Microsys- tems, Silicon Graphics (SGI), and Hewlett-Packard.

Rumors of the death of these proprietary Unixes, though, have been greatly exag- gerated—they will live on for the next few years, and probably well beyond. Companies are sticking with them not because of their intrinsic merit, but for the sake of the end-user applications that run on the Unix plat- form, such as molecular modeling pro- grams for pharmaceutical research.

Imagine you are the chief informa- tion officer of Widget Chemicals, drawn by the zero licensing costs for Linux and the great things your peers at other com- panies say about how it handles their e-mail or database needs. There’s only one snag: all your researchers are devel- oping the company’s new wonder prod- uct on specialized software that only runs on a proprietary Unix system.

“This is what’s keeping Linux from gobbling up market share,” says Al Gillen, research director for system software at market research firm IDC (Framingham, Mass.).

For mission-critical uses, “a lot of the applications weren’t mature enough” on Linux for many customers, agrees Dan Stevens, market manager for life and chemical sciences at SGI (Mountain View, Calif.). SGI offers a proprietary Unix called IRIX, as well as Linux, on both its own MIPS and Intel’s Itanium hardware architectures for servers.

The view from the heart of the Linux world is much the same. Brian Stevens, vice president of operating system development at Red Hat Inc. (Raleigh,

N.C.), a leading Linux software and service provider, concedes that many high-performance end-user applica- tions presently rely on “esoteric fea- tures” of proprietary Unix systems.

A typical assessment of the choices facing vendors comes from Scott Kahn, chief science officer at Accelrys Inc. (San Diego, Calif.), a leading seller of soft- ware for applications in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Kahn says that while Accelrys does try to sup- port its applications on Linux, its empha- sis is still on proprietary Unixes, such as IBM’s AIX and SGI’s IRIX.

“Big sticking points for us with Linux are being able to scale well to work with multiprocessors, [satisfy high] I/O requirements, and [deal with] the lack of consistency between different flavors of Linux,” he told IEEE Spectrum. Cur- rently a number of commercial and other organizations each add supple- mentary software and modify Linux to create their own distributions.

Another deterrent for software ven- dors is that Linux’s rapid development has made it something of a moving tar- get. As new functionality comes online, different distributions often incorporate it in different ways. “The software ven- dors have to feel that there is a stabilityPH

IL M

A R

D E

Linux’s Challenge to Unix Open-source software, widely seen as threatening to the most popular proprietary systems, may not be so threatening after all

even get local broadcasts in digital,” explains the NAB’s Wharton.

That problem was put to rest by an FCC directive handed down last summer. It mandated that equipment makers begin bundling tuners with monitors on a phased-in basis, so that, by 2007, all sets will contain decoders. The FCC also asked content providers to create more pro- gramming and directed cable carriers to start carrying digital signals.

“The FCC mandate in the U.S. will result in more shipments of DTV sets with integrated tuners and end the life of the DTV monitor category,” says Michelle Abraham, a senior analyst with market researchers In-Stat/MDR.

A last landmine—copy protection

The combination of broadcast station and cable conversion to HDTV, more attractive receivers, and friendlier regulation has cre- ated an inertial outcome that’s affecting the remaining parts of the industry, which now want to catch up. As Symes puts it, “There’s been quite a change in the last year or two. Hollywood production of many TV series is starting to go high definition.”

Before HDTV is an accomplished fact, however, broadcasters and content providers—led by CBS—want the FCC to require that signals include a digital watermark called a “broadcast flag” to prevent unauthorized copying of pro- grams. The FCC is currently reviewing comments on this issue, and a vote by its commissioners could come as early as this summer.

“I don’t know if there will ever be a day where, at 3 a.m., broadcasters are going to be delivering HDTV, because it’s very expensive,” says the NAB’s Wharton. “But it’s definitely a go in prime time, and there will be a steady ramp up from where we are now.” —Alexander Wolfe

For the first DVD recorder using HD, see

“Blu-Ray Disc Recorder” at http://

www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/

resource/jun03/blueraysb.html

For British developments, see “UK Now

Has Two DTV Standards” at http://www.

spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/

jun03/dtvsb.html

Index:
index:
INDEX:
ind: