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HDTV - A Gift for the Holidays? by Ken Pyle |
December 2nd, 2003 Issue |
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| Despite my slowness to adopt the latest in television technology, it is obvious that HDTV is now a commercial reality, as evidenced by the daily barrage of newspaper advertisements for various HDTV television sets, large and small. Pixel Consulting's Peter Lowten, who put together the HDTV session at Viodi’s Independent Telco Video Content Conference, called the convergence of relatively, cost competitive HDTVs coupled with programming from multiple sources a “perfect storm” for the adoption of HDTV. Lowten cited numerous examples of MSOs deployments of HDTV. He pointed out that HDTV implementation is becoming ubiquitous, as evidenced by the fact that, at the beginning of October, HDTV had been deployed by cable operators in 18 of the top 20 markets. Programming is becoming more readily available as seen by the speciality offerings of In-Demand, ESPN and others. The new Cablevision Systems Corporation satellite service, VOOM, launched in mid October and is going to market with HDTV as its flagship. Twenty-one of their channels have HD programming exclusive to their service. Lowten also pointed out that that there will be approximately 9 million HDTVs deployed in the U.S. by the end of the year. Although small in comparison to the hundreds of millions of NTSC televisions, it is a significant number, especially considering that the dollar volume of HDTVs sold is now greater than that of standard televisions. What is happening is the hype is turning to reality and Lowten contends that the majority of customers will soon begin to expect HDTV as a standard feature of a triple play offering. He suggested that the telcos’ competitors are “already there” in terms of HDTV deployment. His point was that, in the short-term, telcos’ are going to have to have a credible answer to their customers’ questions regarding their HDTV queries. In the medium-term, they will have to have a credible upgrade plan to serve their customers’ HDTV desires. Doug Mielke of Technicolor discussed HDTV from a perspective of a service provider whose customers include cable networks, studios and other content owners. He has been on the cutting edge of all kinds of compression technology. Mielke concentrates on how to make this technology practical from an operations standpoint. He has lived through the problems that independent telcos will face as they begin to deal with managing digital assets within their servers and networks. He touched upon Digital Rights Management, as well as the power of being able to keep video in the digital domain. Compression, distributing and managing bits become much more of a challenge with HDTV, as the bit rates and the subsequent storage requirements are three to six times greater than NTSC video. For Technicolor, this presented quite a challenge when they first began encoding HDTV programming for some of their larger clients. Little things like being able to use a DVD to transport signals were no longer possible with the high bit rates associated with HDTV. He discussed some of the techniques that they used to get around these challenges. Mielke did more than talk, however, as he demonstrated HDTV content that Technicolor had encoded in Windows Media 9 HD at a rate of 2 Megabits per second. Although this demonstration used Windows Media 9, Mielke emphasized that, as a service provider, Technicolor is neutral to the encoding technology. I have not done Mielke and Lowten’s presentations justice in this brief article, so, in the spirit of the holiday season, Viodi, LLC is going to make the presentation available to the readers of the Viodi View. The specific details are still being worked out, but during the week of 12/18 to 12/25, this presentation will be available on the web for your listening and viewing pleasure at no charge. Details will be provided in the next Viodi View, but please feel free to forward this heads-up to your friends and colleagues, so they can subscribe to the Viodi View and have this opportunity to hear directly from Doug and Peter. All displayed trademarks, logos and service marks are the property of their respective owners. © 2003 Viodi, LLC. All Rights Reserved |
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