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| DATE | 2007-01-18 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] [docs-newsletter@ssc.com: January 18]
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Date: Thur, 18 Jan 2007 04:32:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch
To: suitwatch-at-ssc.com
Subject: January 18
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SuitWatch -- January 18, 2007
______________________________________________________
From Broadcasting to Placecasting
At the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show all the TV manufacturers I spoke to
made one fact clear: the "new TV" would be a 1920 x 1080 screen like the
ones we use for computers, but optimized for television. That means it would
also have HDMI and component video connections and tuners for cable and
over-the-air digital signals, both of which might come in any of 18
different ATSC (Advanced Television System Committee) formats. Picture
scanning would be progressive rather than interlaced.
Never mind that computer screens commonly come in resolutions upward of 1920
x 1080. TV screen makers would plateau their offerings at 1080p and make
other improvements from there.
Specifically, they predicted that 1080p screens
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080p) would be available at Costco for
under $2000 by the end of the year, and that 1080i camcorders would be down
around $1000. They also said full 1080p camcorders would start showing up in
professional gear, but would take longer to come down in price.
Because of predictions like those, the flat-screen bracket over the
fireplace in our new house remained empty for almost two years. That ended
last November .when we bought a new 40" Sony KDL-40XBR2 Bravia screen from
Amazon for $2299. No tax, no shipping charges. A few places charged less,
but I'd never heard of them, and my experience with Amazon (which runs
nearly everything on Linux) has been excellent over the years. (I don't want
to check, but I'm sure the price on our unit has continued to sink.)
I decided to take the plunge after spending a couple nights at the house of
a friend whose 46" version of the same screen also doubles as a computer
display. He'd sit on his easy chair and control his screen with either a
remote control or a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. (I mentioned this back in
the November 14 SuitWatch.) We're not that fancy yet at our house, but I
have tried hooking a computer up to the screen, and the results are
startling -- mostly because photographs look much better than any of the HD
content coming in over TV channels. The resolutions are higher to begin
with, and the images are far less compressed.
TV still has advantages, of course. The main one is that we still like what
we can only get easily from TV stations and networks: movies, sports, and
programs of various kinds. That's why nearly all of us have continued to put
up with the 540-line NTSC and 576-line PAL systems that have been around for
decades. And we still watch SD on HD screens, because that's most of what's
still out there, and ... well, what else are we gonna do? We gotta watch TV,
right?
Compared to SD, HD is pure Deliverance. More than one friend has called the
difference "life-changing". Some forms of programming -- notably sports,
music videos and nature footage -- are so good, relatively speaking, that
they're hard not to watch. At first.
But soon enough, you start picking nits. Every HD picture is plagued by MPEG
compression artifacts: folds, quilting, blocking, mosquito noise... We get
our HD from Dish Network, which currently offers about 30 HD channels, not
counting the premium and PPV ones we don't bother with. I've compared the
picture we get with the cable pictures I see in friends houses and in
stores, and there's no doubt that satellite is better. The system is
all-digital and compresses its signals far less than cable does. But still,
it does compress the pictures. A lot.
And every time they add more channels, they compress the pictures more. I
noticed that problem even on our 16-year-old Sony Trinitron, back when Dish
began adding channels. At one point I put a roof antenna up to check the
difference between the "pure digital" channels from the satellite and direct
over-the-air analog channels from local stations carrying the same
programming. The over-the-air pictures were much better, simply because they
had no compression artifacts. In fact, watching them brought a sense of
relief. "Look: the sky is pure blue, not some kind of blue plaid!"
Now analog TV is worse than terminal. It's condemned. By 2009, every station
in the U.S. is required to abandon its legacy channel on VHF or UHF and fire
up a new digital transmitter on a new channel inside the UHF band. In Los
Angles, KCBS is moving from Channel 2 to Channel 60. KCOP is moving from
Channel 13 to Channel 65. KTLA is moving from Channel 5 to Channel 31. While
these are still channels in the sense that they correspond to a frequency,
they're actually just chunks of spectrum reserved for whatever the station
wants to put there. A digital station facility can actually broadcast a
number of different program streams simultaneously (up to four, I think),
plus data streams of various kinds, inside its spectral chunk.
Part of the FCC's idea here is to advantage terrestrial over-the-air
television, which doesn't need to compress its signals -- at least not as
far as those signals get compressed inside ever-more-congested cable and
satellite digital data streams. But in practice, so far, what I've seen from
over-the-air signals isn't impressive.
We live high on a hillside in Santa Barbara, yet we are not within sight of
any digital TV station transmitter. Our clearest shot at any transmitters,
it turns out, is across the Pacific toward San Diego and Tijuana, two
hundred miles away. With our new high-gain Winegard UHF antenna pointed that
direction, we get a nice bunch of digital signals. KGTV, a CBS affiliate
better known as Channel 10, radiates its digital signal on Channel 25, along
with a second "station" called Tube. KPBS, the PBS affiliate best known as
Channel 15, radiates its digital signal on Channel 30, and adds a second
"station" called "Create".
On New Years Day we watched the Rose Bowl on KGTV, occasionally interrupted
by signal losses that are common in winter here -- at least when you're
dealing with UHF frequencies bending across 200 miles of slowly curving
water. (Here's a photo set of the whole exercise:
http://flickr.com/photos/docsearls/sets/72157594453965824/.)
With digital signals, the loss is much more binary than with analog. There's
no snowy reception or gradual fading as the signal weakens. Instead the
receiver works to keep the picture together with decreasing amounts of data.
The result at first is something that looks like abstract art or one of
those old screen savers that divides your picture into squares and starts
re-arranging them. Then the signal goes away and the receiver thows a "lost
signal" error message on the screen. Our Dish Network receiver, which also
gets the over-the-air channels, can also display signal strength on the
screen. When it gets down to "60" (not sure what that number means, but at
least it's consistent), watch out. Above that, you're fine. (By the way, at
CES I got some hang time with the SiliconDust people. These are Linux
fanatics who make what looks like a real fine over-the-air digital TV
receiver that can serve your TV or hour home computers directly or through a
LAN. Check 'em out at http://www.silicondust.com/.)
After awhile, if you're a digitally-oriented techie, you start to sense how
silly it all is. Few people watch more than two channels at a time (usually
recording one while watching another), meaning most of the data streamed to
us is wasted, making the compression of what we see even more annoying.
Notions like "station" and "channel" seem quaint and antique. And the Net
blew away distance a long time ago. Why shouldn't any of us be able to get
our home town stations anywhere? Sling Media (http://slingmedia.com) has
already made a lot of hay working around that particular bottleneck.
Hey, why even bother with transmitters any more? Why not just put it all on
the Net and watch what you want, when you want it. Or produce what you want,
when and where you want it? These are questions both history and the
marketplace are asking.
The answer, of course, is that the flywheels of business-as-usual are huge.
Same goes for the economics involved in making changes are non-trivial for
the stations. On the one hand stations losing advertising revenue to a
jillion other alternatives. On the other hand digital equipment is still
very expensive. In many cases the equipment is far more expensive than
stations can afford. So on their HD channels they'll carry HD programming
from the network, then drop down to SD for news and other local programming.
I learned about the stations' problems from my friend Terry Heaton
(http://www.thepomoblog.com), a veteran local TV executive and a
consultant of high standing in the business. He tells me neither the
viewership nor the economics of local over-the-air HD are there yet. Not
enough, at least, even to justify experiments that might give stations a
jump on whatever direction the market may end up going.
So I had an idea for him, which he liked and said he'd pass along to the
stations. Here it is: put locally produced amateur high-def productions on
one or more of the secondary channels. People are starting to use high-def
camcorders, and to produce high-def videos. More and more people are going
to want to start sharing those, but won't be able to fight the slow upstream
bottlenecks that their local cableco or telco has provisioned for their
Internet service. But the TV stations have the bandwidth, at least on the
downstream side.
The first place to bet here is with the young folks. High school and college
kids. Next is the "placebloggers" who are also becoming placecasters. The
stations should open a channel to broadcast whatever legal stuff these folks
want to come up with. There are administrative and electronic costs, but few
if any costs for expensive new "professional" gear. Hey, why not?
By the way, professional gear took a big jump downward at CES, where a
company called Red showed off a cinema-grade digital film camera that
essentially makes 35mm-grade cinematography available in digital form at
prices independent producers can afford. It shoots with a 4520 x 2540
resolution (2540 progressive) at 60 frames per second RAW, using a
12-megapixel Mysterium CMOS sensor. It's flexible, format-agnostic, and
costs $17,500. For something this good, that's cheap. Find them at
http://red.com.
This year at CES I didn't have time to get over to the main hall, where all
the latest big screens and related gear were being shown off. I trusted that
the plateau was doing its job. And I figured the action wasn't there anyway.
It was out among the crowd we used to call "consumers". More and more of
them are producers now. Some of them are placeblogging:
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/01/hyperlocal_cont.html. Some of them are
placecasters. It would be wise for stations to get friendly with both.
-- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with
the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and
a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
University.
______________
FEATURED EVENTS
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A new conference from the producers of LinuxWorld. OpenSolutions Summit
will feature two days of peer-to-peer case studies, technical training, and
insightful keynotes that will provide best practices and the latest
innovations across the enterprise. http://www.linuxworldsummit.com
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So many immigrant groups have swept through our town that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://fairuse.nylxs.com DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
"Yeah - I write Free Software...so SUE ME"
"The tremendous problem we face is that we are becoming sharecroppers to our own cultural heritage -- we need the ability to participate in our own society."
"> I'm an engineer. I choose the best tool for the job, politics be damned.<
You must be a stupid engineer then, because politcs and technology have been attacted at the hip since the 1st dynasty in Ancient Egypt. I guess you missed that one."
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