Newsgroups: rec.video
From: tlai@cs.toronto.edu (Tony Wen Hsun Lai)
Subject: Re: hdtv is dead  (LONG)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Date: 13 Oct 92 21:59:51 GMT

In article <13OCT199214185753@pavo.concordia.ca> d_luk@pavo.concordia.ca (LUK, DEREK) writes:
>For all those who were waiting for HDTV to arrive at our pleasure...
>
>HDTV
> is (c)Officialy
>                    d e a d .
>
>The FCC were going to slowly phaze in HDTV during the next decade, and
>xout NTSC. It was decided later that HDTV should be at a digital level
>(which the Americans were researching on) to replace the regular analog HDTV
>signal from the japanese. However - if HDVT was in full effect thru the 
>western hemisphere,... the japanese would OWN IT ALL, and complete control
>the HDTV market with its technology as they had developed HDTV in the first
>place. At the moment, USA and UK have closed the doors on HDTV for good,
>and are ongoing with readily developments of USDigitalTV, where the two
>will work together to develop to a 100% perfect level to be used as a new
>international standard level (ie. no more screw ups like NTSC, PAL, SECAM,
>it will all be *1* which is USDTV). Little stands to condemn this decision,
>as a great invention is to be produced, once again, buy the ones who
>developed NTSC in the first place. There will be little room for the japanese
>to improve upon USDTV, as with technology level USA is at today pretty high
>in the digital field. The Japanese has already invested billions and billions
>and relentless hours and hours and years on perfecting HDTV - with hopes to
>control the market in the future at a world wide level - only now to cry and
>beg for a piece of the pie that USA and UK will now cook up in the oven.
>
>People, it's looking good for this country. Once again, we'll most likely
>see new USDTV vcrs and letterboxed tv screens coming from RCA, and more
>people owning them, than people buying Sony, Mitshibishi, etc. etc., both
>the consumer and industrial field.
>
>This yet - must have been the best news I have heard in the past year.
>Favouring the japanese culture myself (here is another animation fan, yup),
>but I do not live in Japan, and would rather the tables turned for USA to
>start climbing the economic ladder that Japan has shot ahead with its
>cars, a/v equipment, and entertainment (notice half the videos played on
>MTV are owned by Sony Music!).
>
>An exact article of this source news will be made available at this echo,
>so stay tuned!
>
>Bye bye hdtv...

Where do you get this stuff?

You're not thinking of HDTV.  You're thinking of "HiVision".  HDTV is
usually defined in terms of a certain level of quality.  Most people would
agree than an HDTV system should satisfy at least the following.

1. The ideal viewing distance for an HDTV system should roughly 3H, where
   H is the height of the display.
2. The aspect ratio of HDTV should be wider than 4:3.
3. The color rendition and gamut of HDTV should be better than conventional
   TV.
4. HDTV should have more than 2 channels of audio.

In comparison, NTSC-M has an ideal viewing distance of between 6H and 7H.

Also, you don't understand the politics of HDTV.  For instance, to say that
the US and UK are cooperating on HDTV is essentially false.  There are
three rival groups that have digital proposals in the US:
1. General Instruments (USA)/MIT (USA)
2. AT&T (USA)/Zenith (USA)/Scientific Atlanta (USA)
3. Philips (Netherlands)/Thomson (France)/NBC (USA)/Sarnoff (USA)/
      Compression Labs (USA).
The first and second groups have an agreement to share development effort
and patent royalties if one of their systems is chosen.  Note that this
information may be a bit dated.

If you like the idea of digital channel coding in a terrestrial system, you
probably should give credit to GI.  In the US, just about all the proposals
for HDTV were analog or hybrid until GI proposed its DigiCipher system.
After that, there was a mad scramble by other companies to come out with
their own digital proposals.  The digital proposals also had the effect of
making MUSE in Japan and HD-MAC in Europe look quite obsolete; however,
these systems would have been in trouble sooner or later, because they
can't take full advantage of new high-bandwidth transmission systems like
broadband ISDN and wideband (satellite) HDTV.  The EE Times mentioned that
some groups in Japan were working on a digital system that might be used in
5 years.  The New Scientist mentioned that if HD-MAC isn't heavily
subsidized, it will likely be abandoned for a digital system.  There is a
good chance that all the digital standards adopted in the US, Japan, and
the EC will be incompatible with one another.

Oh yeah, RCA is owned by Thomson, a French company.  The only major
American TV company left is Zenith.

Anyway, what do you mean by "this country", since your site is Canadian?
Canada doesn't stand to gain too much economically from HDTV hardware, no
matter what happens.

Tony Lai
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