[LINK] More on US Digital TV

[Chirgwin, Richard]

<last_thought>
I think I take your point about the PAL/NTSC issue ... but I also think to a
certain extent that we're hearing an awful lot of manufacturer obfuscation
re why it's expensive.

So let's roll some realism here. Most of the work will ultimately be done on
one chip of decent size and processing power. To make that one chip doesn't
really justify the prices talked about. The "economy of scale" argument,
given how these things are actually built, is less than honest; a
decoder/controller/receiver chip will be trivially cheap.

The consumer electronics makers are trying to recoup costs, true - not to
develop one multi-standard reconfigurable decoder, but the cost of more than
a decade of Europe-versus-US standards politicking, aborted launches, "HDTV
at last!" prototypes (my first exposure was at the NAB show in 1988), and so
on. 
<last_thought>
RC


-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Whitaker [mailto:jwhit@primenet.com]
Sent: Thursday, 11 January 2001 9:16
To: Chirgwin, Richard
Cc: 'link@www.anu.edu.au'
Subject: RE: [LINK] More on US Digital TV


At 10:39 AM 11/01/01 +1000, Chirgwin, Richard wrote:
>The tvs and stbs are market specific, but what's new? We went with PAL, the
>US was NTSC ... ever it was thus. Hmm, the US market is big, so I guess we
>should also abandon centimeters for inches?

I think there may be a difference today that didn't exist when the PAL 
decision was made.  The television set industry didn't exist.  So 
manufacture sprang up all over the place.  Do you think there will be any 
effort for an Australian TV manufacturing company, let alone a group of 
them, develop to meet this need?  I don't.  So the reliance will be on the 
Japanese manufacturers.  Hence my comment about a Euro dependent 
consideration of the economies of scale. We don't have it on our own.  I 
didn't suggest that we change to a US centric model, but asked if the 
decision not to is just another thorn in the side of the change.

If a marginal improvement, and poorly considered, and 'build it they will 
come' approach such as this is taken, then if there would be any 
possibility of it putting down roots, it would help to have at least some 
leverage.  This incompatibility of the tvs and stbs do not add any 
incentive. There is no room for a manufacture gear up failure if the market 
isn't large enough in potential after time.

The Herald Sun Connect section had a multipage description of the failure 
of this effort as well as some decent descriptions for a lay 
audience.  Peter Familiari panned the whole thing in much the same way 
linkers have.  I would think it's probably not worth spending any more 
energy on it for now and certainly won't part with any money for converting 
myself for many many years if ever.  But I do now need an antenna to get 
the open broadcast signal because of the deterioration of signal because of 
what I assume is changing out of the transmitters.  But that's a $100 fix 
instead of a $multithousand fix for watching the ABC.

Jan

JLWhitaker Associates
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit@primenet.com  --  http://www.primenet.com/~jwhit/whitentr.htm