Sarnoff Corp. Taking the High Cost Out of High-Definition Television Broadcasting New technologies offer benefits such as 40 percent cost savings and unique performance characteristics. Project has contributed to at least six products, one new company, and two new business units.
Advances have spin-off applications in cable television and voice recognition software.
The five-year project is intended to accelerate the adoption of HDTV by U.S. broadcasters by enabling dramatic reductions in the cost of equipment. The project anticipated the 1996 establishment of U.S. digital television transmission standards and broadcast mandates. Although the ATP project will not end until the fall of 2000, participants already have successfully found ways to work efficiently with the massive amounts of data in HDTV images, achieved interoperability among various network types, and developed the requisite software tools for HDTV broadcast signal processing. In addition, technologies for working with compressed HDTV images are being commercialized by Agile Vision Systems, a new company formed by Sarnoff and a computer company not involved in the ATP project. The products will enable studio operations to be performed entirely by one piece of equipment instead of half a dozen, thus reducing hardware costs by approximately 50 percent.