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Filed under: 3D •Business •Cameras •Distribution •Hardware •Legal •Mobile Devices •Post Production •

HPA Tech Retreat 2010 - Day 2

The 16th Annual Tech Retreat was officially opened by HPS President Leon Silverman today. (As with yesterday’s coverage, this’ll be stream-of-consciousness coverage.)

Mark Schubin: Welcome to the 24th annual “this is the year of HDTV”—but press bridges are still analog NTSC, mono audio, 4x3. 1st (or 83rd) “this is the year of 3DTV”. NEP’s first 3D broadcast truck has six (6!) seats for convergence. If 3D makes people ill, do we need 2D glasses for those folks?

Some data: Super Bowl had 106.5 million viewers; largest audience in TV history. Cable penetration has passed 49.5%. [Mark Schubin comments: “Passed” suggests has gone up through.  It’s actually gone down to.  But the word “passed” was in the slide because it’s a percentage of homes passed by cable (homes that could subscribe to cable if they wanted to, whether they do or not).  For ages, the subscriber proportion of the homes-passed was in the range of 2/3 to 70%.  Now it’s below 50%.  Maybe that’s because there are more homes passed.  Maybe it’s competition from satellite, telco, and off-air.  Maybe it’s the economy.]

Pete Putman discussed what happened at CES. 720p 32 inch TVs for $399, 47 inch 1080p for $750, 82 inch RP DLP $2880. $16-$17 / diagonal inch below 50 inches, above 50 inches it’s $34-$35/inch. Internet video watching is growing by 10%-11%/year.2/3 households have an HDTV, but only 5% plan to buy 3D in the next two years. 2/3 pay-TV subs will switch for a 20% savings.

CES crowds up (30-minute cab wait vs 5-minute last year), but fewer vendors (like MacWorld Expo). Samsung showed a 1024x768 1000-lumen projector with LED lamps, good for 30K hours.

Some of Mr. Putman’s more amusing slides (all screenshots and slides are copyrighted by their creators):

Jeroen Stessen of Philips described the 21:9 Cinema TV 2560x1080, 55.9 inch diagonal, same width as 59” 16x9 TV, same height as 44.5” 16x9 TV. Upscales 1920x810 (2.40:1 material) 1.33x to fullscreen.

By default, 16x9 material is shown in “superzoom” mode: slight top & bottom crop, slight horizontal stretch as center, large stretch at edges:

Very few people in the audience approved of this default setting.

Mobile Television Panel - Debra Kaufman, Mobilized TV, Moderator; Jerry Whitaker, ATSC; Paul Childers, Rubber Duck Media Lab; Thomas Ellsworth, GoTV; and Ethan Schur, TDVision.

GoTV is an aggregator / syndicator of mobile TV to handheld platforms for all the major players in the US: Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, MetroPCS, etc. “No handset left behind” (even though there are 200+ video-capable handsets out there).

ATSC’s mobile DTV is carried in the same channels as full-res broadcast DTV as a separate stream; one channel of mobile DTV takes roughly 2 Mbit/sec of the 19.4 Mbit/sec available. It’s based on h.264 video and AAC-V2 audio, transmitted as IP carried in the MPEG-2 stream, with both realtime and non-realtime transmissions possible. The standards are in the ATSC A/153 document set.

Mobile DTV includes channel discovery, Electronic Program Guide, rich-media capabilities, and two way comms. It also includes back-channel capability via phone network for user interaction. Also, of course, live traffic, weather, sports, news, drama, etc—just like regular TV.

Washington DC is being used as a test / showcase rollout market with broadcasters transmitting Mobile DTV and receivers being distributed on a limited basis, but a wider rollout should occur soon (this year); the Open Mobile Video Coalition has 800 TV station members, and the ATSC will be showing a lot of Mobile DTV receivers at NAB.

Ongoing work on A/153 includes provisions for scalable full-channel capability.

TDVision designed the 2D+Delta stereoscopic 3D transport system (seen here at last year’s Tech Retreat) used for mobile 3D, as well as the recently-standardized Blu-ray 3D spec.

A lot of discussion of interaction and mobility as a way to get eyeballs on screens… using smartphone cameras to shoot coupon codes for special offers; finding ways to get folks to watch TV on their mobile devices every day… when it came to delivering the Michael Jackson memorial live to lots of mobile viewers, one-to-many broadcasting worked fine, but one-to-one unicasting bogged down.

What will make this stuff take off? “Enablement at an attractive price” (IMHO this is where OTA(over-the-air) Mobile DTV can trump the offerings of the mobile telcos and their pricey walled gardens). “All the pieces are coming together…” Adobe Flash Player 10.1, just released, works on mobile devices (iPhone excepted, of course!).

Tom Paquin, OnLive, talked about on-line gaming. OnLive offers games on demand with 720p60 video quality over residential-quality networks. The same tech can be used for high-quality interactive media:  640x360 @ 1.2 Mbit/sec with only 1 msec latency (compare to 5 msec for MPEG, 5+ sec for h.264 or Windows Media). The low latency is key. >71% of US households have 2 Mbit/sec or higher, >26% have 5 Mbit/sec or more; 720p60 OnLive requires 1.5 Mbit/sec (peak rate is 4 Mbit/sec with fast action, stereo audio). “The TV is the big deal” though the PC is another usable target. No high-end hardware is needed on the client end as the client’s machine is just a display device; the heavy computing happens in OnLive’s data centers: imagine Crysis on your smartphone. OnLive offers a smartphone-sized “MicroConsole” with power and Ethernet in, HDMI out.  Right now in beta, customers need to be within 1000 miles of a data center.

OnLive pays the telcos for the bandwidth its services occupy, of the telcos don’t “get Googled”—left to supply fat pipes but not receiving any revenue for their work.

Since all the serious work happens at the data server, really the big deal is low-latency high-def over wide-area networks. So, can this be used for media distribution? “I can say that Warner Brothers is one of our investors.”

Panel on the Future of Packaged Media: Plastic Disks or Solid State/Brick & Mortar or Kiosks - Steve Cohen, Raging River, moderator; Ratnakar Lavu, Redbox; Tim Hogan, DVD Station; Jens U Horstmann, NCR; Howell Ivy, Raging River; Jim Taylor, Sonic Solutions.

Kiosk DVD sales and rentals (Redbox, etc.) are growing rapidly; video store sales and rentals are declining. Burn-on-demand services; download-on-demand kiosks. Blu-ray rentals as low as 9 cents per hour.

Redbox: started with 8 units in DC-area McDonalds in 2002. Now 22,000 kiosks including DVD Express. $1/day DVD rentals. Three pillars for success: create convenience, great value proposition, and exceptional customer experience. Kiosks are networked; don’t need to return DVD to the same kiosk it was rented from. Online, smartphone UIs for rentals. Central monitoring for maintenance; constant UI improvement through customer feedback. Kiosks use 2-axis robits, embedded PCs; modular design.

DVD Station: also founded 2002; in the kiosk business / digital download & burning for five years. Is there still a place for pre-packaged media in the digital world?

These advances in speed and storage heralds a sea change in content delivery, but yes: retail stores still have a place as a delivery point for media (see those two red bars in the image above).

Sonic Solutions: DVD-on-demand, whether at the factory, at the store, or in the home. How to protect content? Recordable CSS (“Qflix” brand), or anti-rip tech which may not provide legal protection under DMCA. Rights can be stored in a “digital locker”; WBshop.com is using manufacture-on-demand for back catalog deliverables.

Raging River developed mobile digital players used on airlines (I think I used one in 2007 on the late, lamented MaxJet), and has moved onto deliverables as packaged media, FlexPlay disposable DVD, digital downloads using multi-format card writers, DRM-locked deliverables for mobiles. Pre-loaded content on flash media, USB drives. Hardware-level security.

Next: afternoon sessions

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Thanks again Adam!

I miss Mark Schubin podcasts! I still have all of them here and listen to a random podcast once in a while. Learned really a lot from him!

Ivan

Posted by Ivan Oliveira  on  02/18  at  04:26 AM

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