Defy Those Who Would Degrade Picture Quality, Cuban Urges Set Makers

Cuban said the govt. sits idly as broadcasters refuse to turn back the analog spectrum, but responds to the DTV impasse by slapping set makers with a DTV tuner mandate. Cuban said set makers have been the losers in many of the “death wars” they have been involved in. The time has come for set makers to “dish it out” against program distributors and content owners that want to squeeze more channels into the available bandwidth.

“That’s a real problem for you guys,” Cuban told set makers in the conference audience. “Hardly anyone” is talking about using MPEG codecs to enhance picture quality, Cuban said. “That means that all that work you're putting into improving picture quality is wasted. It’s meaningless.” Failure to “stand up” to content interests means set makers will continue to be the “red- headed stepchildren who'll still be pushed around,” Cuban said.

Multicast-related MPEG compression artifacts of the type Cuban described are most visible on the larger-screen flat-panel displays and microdisplay-based rear-projection TVs that are most popular at retail today, said Peter Putnam, pres. of Roam Consulting, Doylestown, Pa. Common artifacts include “mosquito noise,” usually seen around fast-moving objects, such as cheerleaders on the sidelines on an NFL broadcast, he said. “Some of these artifacts are intrinsic to the display technology being used,” Putnam said. “Combined with compression artifacts, they make for a pretty nasty big-screen TV image.”

But Robert Seidel, CBS vp-engineering & advanced technology, said his network has become “fanatical about preserving picture quality.” From the start, Seidel said, “we've insisted that everything be acquired in 1920x1080.” At the CBS film lot in Hollywood, Seidel said, 23 of the sound stages are equipped for 1920x1080p/24. Moreover, all new cameras installed at CBS’s Television City facility are 1920x1080p/60, he said. “Our goal is to preserve the quality from the very first frame,” he said. “We've refused to lower our data rate,” Seidel said, conceding it has become “a contentious issue” with CBS program distributors. “We don’t want to take it down to 14 megabits or 12 megabits. We don’t believe that’s quality.”

Another panelist, Mark Knox, adviser to Toshiba’s HD DVD Promotion Group, said the real challenge at retail is what content a dealer is going to use to demonstrate HDTV display quality. “Now that we'll have, this year, high- definition packaged content available to retailers to use for demo, every last display device will be demonstrated more effectively, more compellingly,” Knox said. “We'll be able to return to the days of the early ‘90s when mom, dad and the kids came into the specialty retail store, sat down and watched Top Gun as the subwoofer pressure was so high, dad’s wallet came out and they bought the system.”

Knox and his Blu-ray counterpart on the panel, Pioneer Vp Andy Parsons, broke little new ground on attempts by the rival camps to fashion a compromise on a single unified format. Knox said HD DVD remains hopeful that an agreement can be reached on “all aspects” of a unified format, including form factor. But HD DVD had no choice but to move ahead with development in case that didn’t happen, to preserve a late-2005 launch, he said.

Parsons had said Blu-ray’s broad hardware support typifies other successful format launches he has been associated with. Knox responded he always has “admired the quantity” of company logos on Blu-ray PowerPoint presentations. “But all these companies are involved in a myriad of different businesses, and in some cases those businesses are not exclusive to one format or the other.” Parsons said he and Knox -- and other backers of the formats they represent -- “agree on many things.” “Ultimately, though, if I had to summarize what Blu-ray’s all about,” it’s that it typifies what the “optimal” high- definition format should be,” Parsons said. In a slap at HD DVD, Parsons said the industry will “regret it if we accept something less than what we can do.”

HDTV Conference Notebook

The uncertain fate of Voom HD after Cablevision scrapped the project and sold its satellite assets to EchoStar has been a “wild roller coaster ride of emotions” for all those associated with the service, said Greg Moyer, Voom co-gen. mgr. “The good news I'm here to bring is that I still have a job, and I'm still working at Voom -- and you wouldn’t have guessed that maybe in March,” Moyer said. Voom is on the air with 10 channels and plans to expand to 21 by first quarter 2006, Moyer said. “We really have found a home” at EchoStar, Moyer said. “Voom felt, and EchoStar agreed, that the availability of a diverse range of channels would make a difference in the way most people received HDTV in the next several years.”

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With CEA estimating that 2006 will mark the first year when more HD-capable DTV sets will be sold than analog models, ESPN is well-positioned to take advantage, said Bryan Burns, ESPN vp-strategic business planning & development. Burns said spurring the conversion will be the introduction of next-generation Blu-ray and HD DVD, the debut of the next videogame console cycle with PS3 and Xbox, and programming developments such as ABC’s plan to begin broadcasting Good Morning America in HDTV this year. ESPN has been aggressive in developing original entertaining and studio programming in HD, but live events transmitted in high-definition are “the stuff that drives people to buy TVs,” Burns said. After the fall 2002 introduction of ESPN-HD, the network showed 87 live events in 2003 and increased that to 184 in 2004, Burns said. It’s “on track” to achieve 458 this year and hopes to exceed 500 in 2006. ESPN-HD and ESPN2-HD will carry 54 World Cup soccer matches next year from Germany, with ABC to carry the rest in HD, he said. It’s “quality over quantity” that drives ESPN’s decisions on which sporting events to cover live in HD, Burns said. Highlights this year have included the decision to show 5 major league baseball games in HD July 4. The network was scheduled to show 5 Little League World Series games in HD Tues., he said. For the first time, the Pilot Pen tennis championships -- a warm-up to the U.S. Open beginning next week -- will be shown in HD this week, he said. ESPN-HD will be available to over 81 million households this year, Burns said. ESPN2-HD will be available to 20 million, he said. Again citing CEA statistics, Burns said it’s estimated cumulative HD set sales will exceed 100 million in 2008. That’s when the “perfect storm” will have been achieved, he said. But with 180-channel digital cable and DBS already here, only a relatively minuscule number of channels are available in HD, he said. “HDTV owners go there first,” Burns said. Although he said he’s skeptical of CEA projections that 74.8% of TV viewing will be done in HDTV in 2008, even if it’s 50%, the impact will be staggering, Burns said, and programmers with HDTV “will win the ratings game.”