[opendtv] Re: Spectrum Repacking Looms for TV Broadcasters
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2010 08:01:15 -0400
At 7:11 PM -0400 4/3/10, Albert Manfredi wrote:
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
Only the government cheese boxes were affordable
and they were subsidized to the tune of $30
billion.
Where did that come from? I remember their purchase by consumers
being subsidized, not their production. The price point was a market
price. And they initially went for $39.99 on up to about $70, IIRC.
A subsidy is a subsidy.
In addition, the cost of the built-in receiver was, just as I had
said all along, completely negligible by 2007, and certainly by now.
Unlike what all the hand-wringers (including the CEA) were wailing
about. "At least $200 added to the price!!" What BS.
Yes the cost is now reduced, but it is still not insignificant. The
royalties alone are still in excess of $25. My guess is that total
cost to consumer is still in excess of $50 at retail. No way to know
for sure.
If you mean PVRs, I agree. And that has absolutely NOTHING to do
with cost and everything to do with overarching greed.
No it has everything to do with the fact that thaerre is no market
for these boxes.
> Perhaps one reason it took so long to get
affordable ATSC boxes that actually worked here
in the U.S. is related to the complexity of the
receivers?
Of course not. We went through all of this years ago. The
"complexity," as you call it, is all in one chip. That chip became
available in a truly successful form, and in large quantities, in
2003. Yet it didn't seem to find its way into STBs until what? 2007?
Wow. Amazing how it was being built into TV sets for that many
years, yet nothing for stand-alone STBs or PVRs. Right, that was
caused by "complexity." Greed, Craig, Greed, with underhanded deals
and kickbacks.
Complexity.
We did not see affordable products that worked well until at least 2007.
The DVB-T boxes did not need the complex
equalizers that had to be built to make ATSC work.
Everything comes at a price, Craig. The REASON why COFDM can get by
with simple equalizers is that they depend instead on dozens (2K) or
100s (8K) of full power carriers. Where 8-VSB uses only one
attenuated carrier, and the better 8-VSB receivers, since the 2nd
gen, have been able to receive the signal even with the carrier
fully suppressed.
Exactly. DVB required less complex receivers. We also made our system
more complex and expensive by incorporating interlace and all of the
IP that went along with it.
> Once again Moore's Law came to the rescue
As it always does. Weren't you the one championing Moore's Law when
it came to H.264/AVC? So, it was good then, but we shouldn't want it
to apply in this instance?
Of course it applied in this instance. But it is one of the main
reasons that it took so long and cost too much. We could have had a
system that worked well in 2000, even with mobile receivers.
> The world is now ready for HD. We subsidized the
development.
The US market pushed the development, yes. The US market introduced
HD when the rest of the world (and you) were dead set against it. HD
started becoming affordable for the masses way back in 2002 or 2003,
and the large production quantities created by the US market
obviously made it more affordable for everyone else too. The
naysayers did not help in this process, that's for sure.
I was NEVER against HDTV. I was against our STUPID version of HDTV
that was created primarily to enrich the IP rights holders and to
maintain a barrier to competition from the PC industry. We made MANY
bad decisions that are still haunting us.
1. Continues use of interlace - this left us with inferior quality,
more expense and inefficient use of compression and bandwidth.
2. Continued use of 59.94 - just plain stupid! We could have moved to
a progressive system with a 24/36/72 frame basis that would have been
more efficient and would provide better motion rendition that what we
got.
3. No support for widescreen 480P - i.e. 854 x 480. Just part of #1
and the unfortunate reality that we chose a subset of the MPEG-2
standard rather than just implementing the standard properly.
By the way, your a few years early with respect to when it became
affordable for the masses. And it was not the U.S. market or the ATSC
standard that made it affordable - it was the dramatic increase in
panel fabs driven by the computer industry that made HD a reality and
affordable.
The naysayers did nothing to slow down the process. They simply
predicted up front the costs associated with implementing a bunch of
dead-end approaches to HD as noted above. It was the broadcasters who
slowed this thing down. Most local stations are STILL not HD.
Then again, this whole mess was driven by the desire of broadcasters
to kepp their lucrative franchise alive a bit longer...
Regards
Craig
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