COLUMNISTS Continued

Digital TV Limps To The Starting Line

After several years of technical testing and intense lobbying, ACATS narrowed the field to four finalists, but in 1993 decided that it couldn't pick a winner. It then threw the problem back into industry's lap--a typical regulatory response when there is neither sufficient consensus nor a powerful enough constituent to jam a solution down everyone's throats.

This is probably where things would have ended, with th e broadcasters heaving a sigh of relief and the cable, satellite and computer folks heading off to pursue their separate agendas, had not the first whiffs of auction fever started spreading on Capitol Hill. If the broadcasters couldn't produce a credible plan for advanced digital television, it looked as if their warehoused spectrum might disappear forever under the auctioneer's gavel.

Enter the Grand Alliance Taking advantage of this pressure, the bakeoff finalists announced the formation of a grand alliance consisting of a division of AT&T (now Lucent Technologies), Zenith, General Instrument, MIT, and a coalition of Thomson, Philips and the David Sarnoff Research Center (the original inventors of color television and orphaned child of the former RCA). The Grand Alliance promised, and in fact delivered, a standard that contained something for everyone--a Chinese menu of alternatives that broadcasters could leverage to defer upgrade investments for as long as possible. This will support a perpetual flow of demonstrations and feasibility studies, keeping alive the notion that the precious UHF spectrum should be held safe from auctions.

The Grand Alliance standard is on its way to being blessed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), presumably becoming enshrined in regulatory stone for the next 50 years. Based on the idea that if you put enough processing power and memory into a TV it can do anything, ATSC supports 18 different combinations of pixel arrays, frame rates and both interleaved and progressive scanning. Transmission is based on a 19.3-Mbps, packetized scheme that completely separates transport from presentation. In this way, local broadcasters can flexibly relay HDTV network feeds during prime time while filling the airwaves with up to six standard-definition programs during the rest of the day. It's really quite a brilliant compromise--an inversion of the NTSC scheme to introduce color. In this case, consumers would have to buy an all-singing, all-dancing TV set while br oadcasters could slowly and painfully upgrade their facilities to catch up with them.

The only problem is, ATSC does nothing to create a viable business model for broadcasters. The $8 million to $10 million that every station would have to invest to upgrade to digital would be purely defensive--an act of desperation to stem the loss of even more viewers to subscription cable or satellite. This investment might not generate one dollar of additional revenue. This means most station owners would have to be dragged kicking and screaming to populate the spectral real estate that the NAB is demanding be handed over for free.

The biggest tragedy would be to acquiesce to a spectrum giveaway and then mandate that broadcasters actually use it, rather than allow them to sell it and abscond with the money. The latter result is far preferable to seeing this spectrum locked up for another 15 years as broadcasters cry crocodile tears that the market is just not ready for the wonderful world of digital television.

Bill Frezza is the president of Wireless Computing Associates. He can be reached via e-mail at frezza@interramp.com.