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Monday, September 22, 2008

It Had To Happen

The Comeuppance of a Digital TV Critic

I’ve made a bit of a cottage industry out of criticizing the Digital TV transition over the last eight years.  I still hold my core beliefs - that the transition was unnecessary, poorly engineered, and largely a welfare program for equipment companies and TV set sellers.  But the biggest problem in my eyes is that the ATSC standard is locked into the technology of when it was ratified - 1996.  That means that the top-shelf technology of 12 years ago - MPEG2 compression - is supposed to be our TV standard for decades to come.

If you watched any hi-def coverage of the Beijing Olympics, you saw the limitations of ATSC in stark relief.  Plainly put, the 19.39 Mbit/sec available and MPEG2 encoding are not sufficient to provide a clean, artifact-free picture, especially on fast action.  All ATSC-compliant equipment is hard-wired to this standard, and no upgrading is possible.  Of course, in the last 12 years both computing power and compression technology have raced forward at the speed of Moore’s Law.  And ATSC can’t follow, right?  Well, stand by.

As I said, I’m still the #1 digital TV cynic, but with February 17, 2009 looming, even I can read the writing on the wall. So yesterday I finally did it.  I went to the shiny new Costco in Middleton WI and bought a 42” Visio HDTV with 120Hz scanning.  I had it hooked up to an antenna last night, and both the Emmy Awards and the Packers/Cowboys game looked really impressive.  I went to bed with a toe in the future. 

I got to work this morning and opened my email Inbox as usual.  An email from TvTechUpdate cheerfully announced:

ATSC ADOPTS STANDARD FOR ADVANCED VIDEO CODING

Are you freakin’ KIDDING me?  I had an HDTV for less than 12 HOURS and already it’s obsolete?

Ok, cool down...deep breath...deep breath…

OK, first:  Nothing is obsolete.  ATSC/MPEG2 will be with us - as in, the U.S. - for a long time to come.  What ATSC 2.0 (yes, they really call it that) is proposed to do is send signals as H.264 (MPEG4 part 10) to mobile and hand-held devices, However, what the real result of this will be is that when countries that haven’t yet adopted ATSC (for example, Mexico and Canada) finally do so in the next decade, they will get a much improved version, with much more efficient compression.  And us?  We get MPEG2, at least until broadcasters replace their encoders - fat chance - and every TV in the US gets replaced.  Again.  Which hasn’t even happened yet for ATSC 1.0.

They say you can identify pioneers by the arrows in their backs.  Excuse me while I pull this thing out. 

To put it charitably, television broadcasting is not exactly a growth industry anymore.  Announcements like this make me wonder if someone is trying to bury the old girl once and for all.

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My Sharp 52” LCD HDTV is software upgradeable using a USB port on the side of it. It also has every kind of input available today. I currently have one computer hooked to it by analog RGB, and another by HDMI, and a DVD player by component and a Blu-ray player by another HDMI input. The cable company is sending digital SD, and HD signals to it and analog SD by the same RF input.
I suspect that TV stations will be able to use their 20% advertising profit margin to upgrade equipment since they don’t use it to pay their employees.

Posted by DanConklin  on  10/06  at  11:58 AM

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