No Business Case for HDTV? 525
Lev13than writes "The head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation argues that there is no business model for HDTV. Speaking at a regulatory hearing being held by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), CBC president Robert Rabinovitch noted that 'There's no evidence either in Canada or the United States that we have found for advertisers willing to pay a premium for a program that's in HD.' In order to cope with infrastructure and programming costs that are roughly 25 per cent higher, Rabinovitch proposes that the CBC start charging cable and satellite companies to carry their signal, and to limit over-the-air transmission. HDTV — good for Best Buy, bad for broadcasters?"
Re:no common sense case (Score:5, Informative)
Digital either works or it doesn't. A five dollar hdmi cable will work as good as the fifty dollar hdmi cable. Monster may help on analog audio, but doesn't do jack for digital.
This is a myth.
Re:CBC better figure out how to lower their costs. (Score:4, Informative)
To give you an idea, you need 1 ATSC modulator per channel per transmittion tower. Each modulator is in the range of $10000. So we're talking hundreds of millions to convert.
Re:no common sense case (Score:3, Informative)
My point? HDMI cables cost A LOT, even at the low end. And most stores that I've checked (again, not a complete list) don't care more than one or two brands, usually the $75 to $100 versions.
Re:no common sense case (Score:5, Informative)
Think of it another way....do the PC, and use it to tune your HD, to play your DVD's and CD's and everything. You could get rid of settop box and cd/dvd player...hell. put MythTv [mythtv.org] on it, and get rid of the TIVO too. Get a wireless card in it..and download all you want from the net onto it...
Wait for it to power on?? Why would you turn it off? I don't turn off any of my computers around the house.....
Re:no common sense case (Score:5, Informative)
Digital TV has been a disaster in Australia (Score:1, Informative)
And all for what? So, if you have a HDTV, you can watch HDTV movies full off adds, covered by a watermark and with banner commercials racing across.
Internet TV would have been a far better deal, but the Australian Government didn't want to upset Rupert on that either.
Australia is a total f##king joke. We lost it. Pathetic Nation. Yes, I am an Aussie.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/breaking/aust-slow-
Funny how the government broadcaster completely respins this story:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200611/s1795
(BTW the percentage is more like 23%)
Re:GOVERNMENT is the Driver of HDTV (Score:5, Informative)
The reason? Analog broadcast TV takes up a huge chunk of very desirable radio spectrum space. Digital broadcasts can transmit more data in a smaller frequency range.
Re:HDTV (Score:3, Informative)
I would venture to guess, that in the US, the overwhelming majority of people are still watching analog television.
Re:No business case for TV (Score:1, Informative)
HDTV may be a huge upgrade if you're coming from 4:3 analog PAL (and even more so if you're coming from 480i analog NTSC). If you're coming from 576i 16:9 digital (which I've been using since they started transmitting it here, and was using in the UK for years before that), it's much less obvious. Most people probably wouldn't notice the difference.
Re:Chicken and egg (Score:3, Informative)
No, they mandated digital broadcasting, not HD broadcasting. You can get your SD channels over the air digitally. This had nothing to do with promoting new technology and better TV picture quality for consumers, and everything to do with reducing bandwidth consumption so they could sell off the old analog spectrum. This was not an altuistic move on the part of the FCC.
Not that I'm complaining, of course. I love my HDTV.
Re:no common sense case (Score:1, Informative)
All the data is recovered or lost by the PLL through a process called clock and data recovery (CDR), which is widely used in telecommunications and computer applications (busses, storage).
IEC 958 type II -- like AES3 -- uses biphase mark coding which results in a change in polarity at least once every two bits. With BMC, clock recovery is trivial for data rates that are half the bandwidth of the signalling frequency. The voltage levels or light amplitudes can be completely messed up since BMC uses polarity shifts. Consequently, absolutely awful shitty physical media can be used. This was deliberate -- IEC-60958 envisaged cheaper media for the frequencies being dealt with by AES/EBU applications. TOSLINK and IEC 958 type II coax are essentially AES/EBU over cheaper gear, which turns out to have been a win for its users.
Clock and data recovery is a solved problem for up to tens of gigabits per second with decent quartz oscillators so long as the data stream has reasonable numbers of transitions. Telecomms usually uses 8B/10B encoding and in computer applications 8B/10B is used in SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, HyperTransport, PCI Express and so forth. BMC has even better properties at the cost of turning each source data bit into two encoded bits, rather than turning 8 source data bits into 10. The doubled clocking frequency and extra bandwidth demand for the encoded bits across the medium has a cost. This cost is small at the very low data rates used in digital audio applications.
Thus the major risk in the BMC approach is that a shitty oscillator is used in order to save a few pennies. When one of your oscillators is bad (as in, drifting), you're toast, no matter how good your encoding or transfer medium happens to be. However the encoding and the overlaid protocol are resilient to errors, and cables aren't going to introduce dropouts nearly as much as being unable to align the phases of the receive-side optics (or electrics) and the receive-side oscillator because the latter drifts too much. (This is especially annoying when the drift is mainly triggered by mechanical forces (device movement) or heating under use, since cheap part manufacturers often don't QA their oscillators against those).
This is either poor phrasing or poor understanding. The clock recovery is done by comparing the received signal phase against the corrected phase of a local clock. Frequent transitions allow for the correction, locking the receive-side oscillator to the transmit-side one. If either clock is irregular there will be data loss because the PLL can't keep the edges of the phase changes aligned. However, if both clocks are regular, the PLL will rapidly arrive and maintain at a phase alignment. The oscillator behaviors are the key, not the transmission medium.
The symptom of clock jitter in a CDR application is simply data loss, which in the AES3 protocol results in the loss of an audio block, which is likely to be audible as a dropout or pop.
Re:Hooray for sanity (Score:3, Informative)
You're new here, then?
About slashdot moderation. [slashdot.org]
Re:Hooray for sanity (Score:1, Informative)
But so far, nobody seems to carry CBC in high definition, except perhaps Expressvu (Bell's satellite offering). But that requires you to buy a 300$ HD receiver (700$ if you want the PVR, and most people want that nowadays) - plus ~15% tax, and sign up for an expensive monthly contract ("HD Essentials" is 67$+tax/month) for at least 2 years. That's over 1700$ for the first year alone. And that's assuming you've already bought the nice & expensive HDTV. CBC's current programming doesn't warrant me spending anywhere near that much!
Otherwise, you're stuck with their 16:9 version of standard def contents. 60 pixels on top & bottom being black bars. Being transmitted at 544x480 on expressvu (likely equivalent resolution by other broadcasters), and with the black bars, you have a 544x360 picture left - more or less half of DVD resolution (it doesn't look very good). And with the black bars, on my dad's old 27" TV, it's a pretty small picture.
I love my movies in widescreen, but everything else? (news, series, etc) There's no need for that. Besides, it's the ONLY channel we watch that's not 4:3, so buying a widescreen TV would mean black bars on either side of every other channel (or stretching the pic or such), which is even worse.
It was a good idea to go HD, but it was poorly executed. You can't get the HD version for the most part, except perhaps one sat provider, provided you're willing to spend ~2700$/2 years. Otherwise you (i.e. the vast majority of folks) get a really poor - and small - picture. Their HD transition has only amounted to a 25% smaller picture for everybody so far.
And now they're saying there's no business case for it too, higher costs, etc.
Re:No business case for TV (Score:1, Informative)
Re:No business case for TV (Score:2, Informative)