[opendtv] Re: Technology years
- From: "Dale Kelly" <dalekelly@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:13:06 -0800
Reply Interlineated:
> Interesting points. You do seem to put a lot of weight on the potentially
> negative impact the ATSC itself has on this sordid state of
> affairs. I'm not sure that's entirely warranted.
I was also inclined to see it that way until I became involved in the ATSC
process and also in a DTV discussion group, related to receiver performance
issues, that consisted of Broadcaster groups and the CEA.
Remember, that ATSC, in reality, is not an altruistic organization formed to
develop a DTV system in the best interest of the countries TV viewers. It is
overwhelmingly controlled by it's CEA component and one (sometimes two)
broadcast networks. Innovation in that organization is stifled to protect
the interest of manufacturers and their IP, along with the very short
sighted locked in business model of the TV network. These groups most often
vote in lock step and are responsible for stopping or watering down almost
all attempts to innovate the standard.
> To keep this as precisely comparable as possible, what makes
> Australian DTT
> successful is already doable with ATSC as is. No need to rely on the ATSC
> being overly clever about implementing E-VSB or A-VSB, for
> example. And the
> Aussies stuck with 64-QAM, same as us (well, equivalent to us).
>
> And yet, even when nothing of extraordinary insight is being asked of
> anyone, hardware is still not available. I understand your points about
> DVB-T hardware theoretically being harder to stop, but there's no
> reason in the world to believe that plain old A/53 hardware should have
> been easy to block either. For the basics, we don't need anything new. And
the
> basics is all any other country is using for their FOTA TV, for the time
being.
ATSC hardware was not up to the task until recently, in the interim many
jumped ship, while still mouthing support they were in reality "following
the money".
> Why aren't plain old 4th/5th gen ATSC STBs, PVRs, and DVDRs positively
> oozing out of China? Available for direct purchase on web sites?
> So I have a lot of faith that DVB-T hardware would also be blocked. The
> salesmen would simply be telling us that there's no demand for
> DTT hardware (adjusted for US 6 MHz channels), and you wouldn't see
anything in stock.
My understanding is that the 6MHz mode is mostly standard in DVB hardware.
In any event, they simply could not have blocked the DVB recovers. It's
performance is too widely known and the early adopters would have shouted
it's praise rather than doing just the opposite, when ATSC failed.
>
> Another parenthetical point is that some text in ATSC documents is just
> policy statements, I believe. Like the business quoted by John
> Shutt. To me, those are easily changed with the stroke of a pen.
Tell that to the CE community.
> For instance, IIRC, A/90 included some policy statement that any
> broadcast
> TV streams would have to use MPEG-2 compression. But that wasn't
> a technical
> limitation of A/90, just a policy statement, which was obsoleted with the
> draft standards for AVC and VC-1. As far as I can tell.
I believe it was the FCC who memorialized the use of MPEG2 and I'm not
confident that the AVC or VC-1 codecs will see the light of day without the
addition of a "silver bullet". That observation is based upon my early
membership on the sub committee that is considering this possible
innovation.
Dale.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:
- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at
FreeLists.org
- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word
unsubscribe in the subject line.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:
- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at
FreeLists.org
- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word
unsubscribe in the subject line.
Other related posts: