TV manufacturers and broadcasters hope to complete a draft of a set of voluntary performance guidelines for DTV receivers by next May, said Mark Richer, pres. of the Advanced TV Systems Committee. Simply agreeing to sit down at the negotiating table represents a huge step forward for DTV, he said. Broadcasters and TV manufacturers have been arguing for years over who’s to blame for spotty DTV reception, with broadcasters blaming tuners and manufacturers arguing that broadcast signals are weaker than allowed by the FCC.
The FCC should condition approval of News Corp.’s acquisition of Hughes on DirecTV’s adoption of a set-top box that uses a multimedia home platform (MHP) standard, Sun Microsystems said. “Standards bodies and industry groups including DVB [Digital Video Bcstg.], the Advanced TV Systems Committee (ATSC)] and CableLabs have agreed on a common platform for execution of applications delivered via a digital TV stream,” the company said, and migration to the standard by DirecTV and News Corp. would be a “significant boost” to the adoption of a “worldwide content platform.” Sun said a single platform would benefit everyone with increasing competition, “lower technology costs and more widespread availability of TV-based services and content.” It said if migration to the standard wasn’t required, the Commission at least should encourage it.
Second-quarter DTV product sales to dealers climbed 69% in units and 43% in dollars, the CEA reported Wed. The quarterly tally included June shipments of 365,210 units worth $524.1 million, CEA said. The figures included integrated DTV sets and monitors capable of at least 480p. Integrated sets must include ATSC decoders. In the 2nd quarter, the CEA said, shipments of standalone set-top decoders climbed 161% in units to 49,928 and 171% in dollars to $22.3 million. Cumulative set-top unit shipments through June reached 397,512, CEA said. It said 304,000 integrated DTV sets with ATSC tuners had been shipped in that period.
Wireless carriers and others cautioned the FCC this week that an inquiry on receiver performance requirements should lead to neither mandatory standards for their industry nor creation of an “interference temperature.” Cingular and BellSouth went so far as to recommend that the Commission suspend the inquiry for now because it didn’t have enough concrete information on the noise floor in different bands. But Microsoft said it favored the FCC’s setting such receiver specifications, saying in comments this week: “If Commission licensees are to continue to enjoy protection from ‘harmful interference,’ then it is in the public interest for the Commission to define the extent of that protection just as explicitly as it defines geographic exclusivity or channel assignments.”
Pappas Telecasting urged the FCC to apply regulatory parity to cable interoperability and over-the-air reception for DTV sets. The Commission should incorporate in its rules minimum performance standards being developed by representatives of the bcst. and CE industries under the Advanced TV Systems Committee, the filing said. Pappas also called on the FCC to adopt the “recommended practices” being developed by the ATSC and incorporate those in the Commission’s rules alongside the rules for “plug-&-play” interoperability. “Precedent has been established for the adoption into the rules of a similar joint effort between our industry and the consumer electronics industry to ensure adequate over-the-air digital reception for the tens of millions of viewers who receive their signals exclusively over the air,” said Peter Pappas, exec. vp-govt., regulatory and business affairs, Pappas. Pappas owns 20 Fox, WB, ABC, CBS, UPN and Azteca America affiliates and operates 3 other stations under local marketing agreements (LMAs).
Voluntary guidelines for digital standards to be built into TV receivers have moved a step closer to reality with an agreement announced Mon. by broadcasters and set manufacturers to let the Advanced TV Systems Committee (ATSC) move forward on their development. The action comes after “months and months” of “historic opposition to standards of any sort for digital receiver performance” by the consumer electronics industry, a broadcasting official claimed.
The contention that there’s a looming “Napster effect” waiting for digital TV is “vastly overstated,” Public Knowledge (PK) said in a filing at the FCC, and the best way for broadcasters to protect their content may be to switch to HDTV, which is difficult to transmit over the Internet. Responding to a filing by MPAA Pres. Jack Valenti on the broadcast flag, Public Knowledge said part of his letter was “deeply misleading from a technical standpoint.” PK said Napster relied on the fact that people could download a song in minutes, rather than the hours or days it would take to download an hour of DTV programming. Even with reduced resolution, downloading still would take ages, it said. “Since HDTV files are particularly large, they are therefore particularly difficult to trade over the Internet (or, for that matter, to store in large numbers on one’s computer’s hard disk),” PK wrote. The broadcast flag doesn’t lend itself to nuanced encoding rules for home use and it would make for difficult enforcement, especially when demodulation of ATSC becomes routine, the group said. Another solution would be encryption at the source, PK said. Meanwhile, in a separate filing, broadcasters dismissed claims that the FCC didn’t have the authority to adopt the broadcast flag. MSTV, NAB, News Corp., Disney and others said in an ex parte filing that the FCC previously had set rules for TV reception equipment without an express statutory mandate, citing the color TV transition, and “there is no reason it should not do so here.” It said Congress authorized implementation of DTV in 1996, but intended that the FCC work out the details. Waiting to see whether programming redistribution becomes a problem before acting is “precisely backwards,” they said.
Stressing a can-do attitude to the FCC, companies are unveiling their plans to move the digital transition forward. The filings by Comcast, Fox, Philips, Zenith others came in response to a series of questions from FCC Media Bureau Chief Kenneth Ferree in May (CD May 23 p1) seeking specific information about each company’s efforts. His letters went to broadcasters, cable operators, CE companies and satellite operators.
Thomson “intends to fully meet” the FCC’s mandate that at least 50% of the 36” or larger TV sets sold be equipped with ATSC tuners by July 1 next year, David Arland, dir. of public & trade relations, told the Commission Fri. Thomson also urged Commission to set same July 1, 2004, deadline requiring DTV stations to transmit at full power. In response to a request by FCC Media Bureau Chief Kenneth Ferree for progress reports on key points of the DTV transition, Arland said his company also was developing products “that will ensure that we meet the other requirements of the digital tuner/decoder mandate from 2004 through 2007.” However, he said Thomson believed “a critical element of meeting this mandate” was rapid FCC approval of the cable-consumer electronics “plug-and-play” agreement: “We anticipate that the majority of consumers who will be shopping for HDTV sets will be expecting ‘cable-ready’ products that work seamlessly with existing cable networks.” Arland told us that Thomson and other CE makers were “disturbed” to learn at the recent NCTA show that the FCC planned no action on plug-and-play before Sept. Given that timetable, Arland said, “the window is closing fast” on makers’ ability to provide a comprehensive cable-ready solution in time for the July 2004 tuner deadline. Arland said Thomson “is just not willing to take the risk” of building full cable functionality into DTV decoders mandated for July 2004 on chance that negotiated agreement on plug- and-play will be changed. Arland’s letter said “successive generations of DTV products are improving” as makers gain more and more “real world experience with DTV transmissions and the various factors required to adequately receive, process and display digital audio and video signals… Those improvements come without govt. intervention but rather in the presence of a much more powerful motivation -- competitive pressure.” But Arland said such advances in receiver performance could go only so far: “Regrettably, most local broadcasters are NOT transmitting their digital TV signals at full power.” He said the Commission’s most recent figures indicated only 25% of commercial broadcast stations were on the air with DTV transmission signal “that covers their analog station service areas. This raises the prospect that a very significant number of homes that receive a station’s analog signal cannot receive that station’s digital signal.” Arland said “the suggestion by many broadcasters that ‘insensitive receivers’ are somehow to blame for poor consumer reception of digital TV signals misses the real problem, which, Thomson respectfully suggests lies not with receiver sensitivity but rather by a lack of commitment of the broadcasting community to transmit their digital TV signals at full power.”
Industry DTV shipments exceeded one million sets in 2003’s first 20 weeks ended May 16, the CEA said. Comparisons with 2002 aren’t available because the DTV data for the year earlier were compiled only on a monthly basis. CEA has projected a 43% rise in DTV shipments this year to 3,850,000 sets from 2,680,000 in 2002, including standalone direct-view, projection, plasma and LCD sets and those with integrated ATSC tuners.