More Details About HDTV Pact 343
Masem writes "The NYTimes reports that a pact between the makers of HDTV systems and cable and satelite providers appears to be a consumer-friendly route to pushing HDTV technology. The solution proposed by the two groups will remove the need for a set-top box to receive the programming (save for on-demand or interactive services) in upcoming HDTV sets, and will standardize on the DVI port for these (Existing HDTV's, however, will probably still need some set-top device for compatibility - the deal specifically requires set top boxes to send both analog and digital signals as to support older HDTVs). The proposal must still get FCC approval before it becomes set in stone."
will Joe User want this? (Score:5, Insightful)
The FCC can shovel HDTV down our throats all they want. The technology is still too damned expensive for most people.
Re:will Joe User want this? (Score:1, Insightful)
The main reason I play computer games vs consoles is because I can't stand the poor quality of the tv, but it seems that most people consider it to be quite good.
Hell, most people don't even notice when the color is so far off that red appears purple...
Re:will Joe User want this? (Score:1, Insightful)
wont have a choice.
he will have to get digital service. the other wont be offered.
he will have to get an hdtv capable set, his old one wont function.
there wont be a choice, joe user will adopt it, or not watch tv. and that second option is not even there for the drooling masses
Hmm? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Last Word (Score:4, Insightful)
Because hollywood knows that the world revolves around them, and that people couldn't, for example, just get out of their house and do something else besides being planted infront of the set.
N.
"Allowed" to record!? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am currently "allowed" to record whatever the hell I want to and watch it whenever I wish. Well, maybe not allowed, but I do it. I doubt mass consumers will be pleased with such a giant step backward.
Re:Wrong. (Score:2, Insightful)
The only thing I can see that is consumer freindly is the standardization, but that's a double edged sword. Somehow, i doubt it's an open standard, because if it were, the copy protection/encryption would be broken within a few hours of it's release.
Yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
I love my HDTV setup. I'm lucky enough to be in a good place where Time Warner supports HD. I just wish they would add DiscoveryHD.
Hail our benevolent HDTV masters! (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Standardize digital cable TV reception in TV sets so as to eliminate set-top boxes -- meaning that your TV will, after 30 years of cable TV imprisonment, finally regain the ability to CHANGE THE DAMNED CHANNEL. Thanks, guys, but I would rather've seen you do this in 1980, when you first forced me to use your stupid boxes.
2) Mandate that any set-top box with two output connectors (analog and digital), support output to both connectors. Because there are dozens of manufacturers out there just begging to sell boxes with connectors that don't do anything. Thank you, cable TV industry, for protecting us from these monsters!
3) Place severe restrictions on the programming you can record, after putting the cable 'box' inside the TV, giving you no chance to intercept the video signal. Of course, I'm sure that cable HDTV hardware built into the TV will obey the same copying restrictions as the set-tops. Voila! Uncopyable television. It's a DRM wet dream -- total control of your viewing experience!
Thank you, oh benevolent HDTV overlords, for blessing us with thy loving oversight!
Re:Congress needs to Address the NFL Sunday Ticket (Score:5, Insightful)
Spoken like a true shill for the cable industry!
DirecTV is usually cheaper than cable for comparable service levels, and is available with free installation. The boxes are often free to new subscribers as well. Unlike cable, DirecTV hasn't raised their rates multiple times a year (in my town, standard cable rates have nearly doubled in the past three years, DirecTV hasn't budged.)
Rather than being a "rich man's toy", satellite TV is just as affordable as standard cable. The only caveat is that you need to be able to mount a dish that points to the correct part of the sky. Most homeowners can do this, as can many apartment dwellers.
I couldn't care less about football, but I shed no tears for the cable industry which has used its monopoly to drive up prices and drive down service quality.
No External Set-Top Boxes... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Digital recording... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think anyone should be able to limit what I can do with my own equipment. If someone chooses to break the law by copying and distributing copyrighted material, they should be the ones to receive punishment, not the rest of us who just want to archive our favorite television show.
I'm tired of seeing all this "Rights Management" bullshit on consumer electronics. Why are the recording industry's rights more important than the consumers'? The people who REALLY hurt the entertainment industry by pirating are the ones that mass-produce bootleg DVD's and sell them on the black market, and those people aren't affected by any of these restrictions on consumer equipment anyway.
well, not rabbit ears (Score:3, Insightful)
The rural areas of the US have no "cable" tv, you use over the air or basically small dish, I'd say it's running roughly 50% or so around here people who have small dishes. I don't know what the breakdown is, but as a sort of rule of thumb, cable tv is very limited to only urban areas or very close to them, which leaves some huge land mass area in the US that doesn't have cable and probably never will. That's one of the tradeoffs for living where it's nice and unpopulated, if that's your gig. I swap deer in the yard and a large garden and the nearest neighbor close to 1/2 mile away for urban conveniences like cable and quickstores every hundred yards and hot and cold running crackheads and huge crime,loud, noisy, dirty, etc. Different strokes and stuff.
As to serving the public interest, hell ya! I can't tell ya how many complaints I've filed about the major broadcasters/networks. I think it sucks bad those goons get a rubber stamped license to print money year after decade after generation. They skew the news, propogandize to the detriment of the people in general, emphasize some truly weird stuff like taking up a full 1/3 of local alleged "news" 7 days a week with SPORTS? And the programming is more social engineering leading to absurd consumerism and political non-awareness than any sort of "good" near as I can see, with just a few exceptions. It's bread and circuses keep the population dumbed down in part. But, seems like most folks don't really care just accept it, home from work, start the beer buzz, veg. The globalist fatcats love it, keeps the billions rolling in, keeps the goons in power, double win for them.
Re:Good news?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hail our benevolent HDTV masters! (Score:3, Insightful)
Digital cable only made the problem an order of magnitude worse, because now there is a plausible reason for providers to *absolutely require* a set-top box, for any kind of cable television viewing. Once again, they are projecting their authority into your domain.
Originally you paid for video signals coming into your house through a wire. You were free to watch, record or timeshift the signals as you pleased.
Then came cable boxes. You still paid for the signals, but you were at the mercy of this little black box, which they controlled. It was okay though -- because you still had a signal coming out; you had the marginal freedom of doing what you wanted with the CATV signal.
What they're proposing now is that you buy a new TV, which accepts an encrypted HDTV signal and displays the contents, but obeys the restrictions they place on the viewing, recording and re-use of the contents. Now, your TV itself is their domain.
Re:will Joe User want this? (Score:5, Insightful)
There aren't many people who watch my Sony Wega and don't comment on how good the picture is.
Compared to the cost of the house renovations the cost of the TV is lost in the noise.
Of course I am not exactly a price sensistive buyer - I almost bought a plasma TV. But most slashdot readers probably have loptops that cost more and will be lucky to get 24 months use out of them before they deteriorate into a mess of patching tape.
Of course you only really get the benefit if you have a digital source. For me thats DVD or Satelite.
HDTV will be big but not I suspect in the way that the FCC has been expecting.
First off HDTV will fail completely if you can't record the signal for personal use. Equally it will fail if you can't use a PVR. I don't care how great the picture looks, it looks shite as far as I am concerned if I have to watch the commercials.
Secondly the killer apps for HDTV are probably DVD and satelite signals. I very much doubt that the cable industry can upgrade in time to be relevant. Broadcast HDTV is utterly irrelevant, the specifications don't work. The only reason the FTC keeps banging on on the broadcast HDTV is that without broadcast the rationale for such a high degree of FTC involvement goes away. Also the politicians are wondering how they get their ads out if everyone is watching satelite and the Web where the ads are national and not local.
Thirdly the FTC mandate for large TVs to have HDTV tuners will fail. Those TVs will simply become 'computer monitors', the broadcast tuner will be an optional extra which most consumers don't need or if they do need it it will be possible to turn it on using a secret code which the store assistant will tell you.
Fourthly convergence between the computer and the TV will drive the large scale adoption of HDTV. This is already being seen, look at a plasma TV and the chances are better than even it is actually hooked up to a computer not a TV. HDTVs will be bought for video games entertainment rather than passive TV watching.
Finaly until there is a DVD standard that distributes HDTV content the only benefit the average user will get is seeing the films in American widescreen format (16:9) rather than academy ratio (4:3) since the poor user won't have any HD content to view.
Consumer Friendly? Retailer Freindly, maybe. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not consumer friendly to integrate the STB with the monitor. It will make it easier to sell though.
HDTV's are monitors, and why that is seen as a problem I don't really understand. So the STB is integrated into the set, what does this mean? Only thing it means to me is you don't have a separate box. You'll still have to pay for the components, they're just inside the TV instead of next to it.
I'd rather have a monitor capable of 1080i and 540p or 720p that simply has component video in along with a STB that handles the conversions and outputs to a resolution my monitor can display. This way I can feed my component video to any device that supports it and display or record it if I wish.
It does not benifit me to have a TV that traps the signal, and provides no output or limitted output. It may seem easier if I just need to plug one cable into the TV, but it certainly doesn't benifit consumers beyond initial setup ease.
What would be consumer friendly is a recording device that could take a 1080i, 540p, or 720p signal and record it and replay it in the same format.
Don't let them fool you, this is retailer and provider friendly. It will help cable providers keep their "you don't need and extra box" advertising fodder, the networks by preventing you from recording programming, and retailers, not consumers.
Re:Joe User won't have a choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Since everybody in America is going to need either a new TV or a new set-top box, and practically anybody can sell these set-top boxes, they're practically going to be giving them away.
Re:WHAT? You still watch BROADCAST?!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
I couldn't agree with you more. The picture is fine on my tv with digital cable. DVDs are very crisp and colorful. HDTV isn't worth it to me.
Maybe their goal is to see how many old style TVs can fit into a landfill?
Why not just let HDTV take over naturally?
Other killer apps (Score:3, Insightful)
People spent stupid amounts of money to watch sports. Most large screen TVs were sold so people could watch their (foot|base|basket)ball at 40+ inches at a ripping ~400 x ~320 res.
NTSC (never twice same color) was developed in 1925 and standardized by 1927. It allows for around 525 lines vertical res. You're lucky if a GOOD SVideo will put out 400. Enough to trick the eye, but then 24 frames/second tricks the eye pretty well in the theater. The eye is easily fooled and the brain can make pictures out of the most staticy images. Doesn't mean that better won't look lots better to you, it just means that you can see ok with really bad images; like NTSC.
If you've ever seen the experimental film stuff that ran at > 60 frames/sec rather than the 24 you see in the theater, you'd notice that camera motion doesn't blur the screen radically. Some parts of LOTR were just hard to see because of that. (both CG and real).
Current TV is "good enough"
Well yeah. So was 18 frame per second film in 1910 (old old films sometimes look very fast cause they were shot at 18FPS and xfered at 24 by fools).
We could have, and should have, dumped the current NTSC signal when color came along. But "thousands" of people had bought these expensive TVs so the gubmint decreed that any of this new fangled color stuff must be viewable on the good ol black and white TVs. Nice work.
I came out of film. I hate movies that lop off around 1/4 of the screen when shown on TV. Most film camera view finders have TV ratios marked on the viewer so directors these days don't have much action on the sides (lame, but most producers and directors know that most of the viewing money comes out of video, in the end), but sports is really an immediate driver.
When I was in the UK, widescreen was being pushed as "See *all* of the world cup, not just 3/4's of it."
As I travelled through Asia, bars in the most impoverished nations had widescreen high res showing Football aka Soccer everywhere. With crowds.
So imagine the NFL pushing that with HD/Wide you get to see it more clearly - so they can use longer shots and you get the same resolution you USED to have, but lots more of the field in the frame. Imagine taking your cheapo 19" and stacking 2x2 of them. Each with the same resolution but continuing the a larger image. That's 1080i.
Don't believe for a minute that these people who pay $100+/month for sport feeds, who have old huge $2000 dishes in their yards - now worthless and replaced by little dishes, won't drop a year of satellite fees on a HDTV. Or two years. That's beer money, dude. These guys are the ones not buying new computers every two years.
What if Superbowl/2004 or the world series was shot ONLY in HD? What if movies were shown all there but "squeezed" for you guys watching that 100 year old 4:3 ratio stuff?
You wanna stick with your mommy's 19" $150 TV past 2006? Fine, someone will come out with a box that drops 3/4 pixels for you. And everything will be letterboxed. And eventually, older HD's will be available on the used market for cheap.
Now, where can I get a video card that works well on 16:9? The most my computer will dump on my 30" HD wide is 1280x1024. Unreal rules at 30".
Who still watches TV anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I know that there are millions and millions of zombies out there who spend their lives in front of "Survivor" or whatever crap they are being told to watch by the network marketing droids. This only proves my point: TV is what people do who are too dumb to use a computer.
Seriously. What is there to watch? News? Get your news off of the Internet (Fellow Americans: Try the BBC [bbc.co.uk] for a serious eye-opener about what CNN, Fox, and Time Warner don't think you should be interested in). Sitcoms? The only thing that even comes close to being entertaining for people with an IQ over 60 is "Buffy", and you're better off waiting for the DVD version anyway, unless you're into watching ads every five minutes. Information? Yeah, the "Discovery Channel" is nice, but it can't compete with this cool technology call "books". Films? Get the DVD, they don't have the commercials and they don't have half of the stuff hacked out to make the censorship people happy. With the money you've been paying those cable people, you could have had surround sound years ago.
Anybody who is willing to pay a company to let themselves be bombarded with commercials is getting what he or she deserves. Screw TV in analog or digital: You have a computer, or else you wouldn't be reading this; all you need now is a DVD player and a bookshop. If you are a TV zombie, you shouldn't be on Slashdot anyway.