By Elina Shatkin, August 27, 2004
July 1 has long figured prominently in the history of television. It's the birthday of Baywatch's Pamela Anderson, Saturday Night Live's Dan Aykroyd, M*A*S*H's Jamie Farr, Upstairs, Downstairs's Jean Marsh, and NYPD Blue's Henry Simmons, among others. It's when Elvis Presley first appeared on The Tonight Show. It's when Court TV debuted. It's when the British got color TV and their second channel. It's when the first commercial television licenses went into effect.
This year, July 1 marked the date two other Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules went into effect. One required U.S. cable television operators to provide CableCARDs to subscribers who wanted them. The other required 50% of TV sets 36 inches or larger to include digital terrestrial television (DTT) broadcast reception circuitry, the start of a phased-in approach that would have DTT reception circuitry in even VCRs by 2007.
Both rules have been promoted as speeding the transition to all-digital television by eliminating the need for set-top receiver/decoder boxes. CableCARDs slip into slots on "digital-cable-ready" TVs to deal with conditional-access issues; the digital reception and decoding is handled inside the set. Similarly, so-called "integrated" TV sets (which include all "digital-cable-ready" models) can deal internally with DTT signals.
Actually, neither concept is new. The FCC originally required point-of-deployment (POD) modules, the functional equivalents of CableCARDS, to be available in 2000 for much the same purpose. And integrated TV sets with built-in DTT reception circuitry predate even those.
It seems likely, however, that not a single POD was supplied to a cable subscriber between 2000 and 2004; there was no equipment available to accept them. Now there are quite a few models of "digital-cable-ready" TVs with the necessary slots, and, although some cable operators might not have been ready as the clock struck midnight on June 30, the CableCARD supply today seems assured
. But are subscribers ordering them?
The first generation of "digital-cable-ready" TVs is "ready" in a one-way sense only. They can decode digital streams into audio and video, but they can't send information back to the cable system. The VCR-like control functions offered by some cable operators for their video-on-demand services require a set-top box. So does remote control-activated impulsive pay-per-view. So do interactive electronic program guides. If subscribers want those services, they need a set-top box from their cable operator, regardless of the "readiness" of their TV sets.
Then there are the integrated sets. A survey of the newspapers of four major cities for the week following July 1 of this year found only 17% of the ads for TV sets over 35 inches to cover those with integrated DTT reception. If the single retailer with the most (still well under 50%) is removed, the proportion drops to 11%. Manufacturers may be complying with the rule, but retailers aren't promoting those products.
Why not? One simple issue is money. Integrated sets cost more. And the additional cost buys nothing for a viewer who receives all programming via cable, satellite, or DVD.
A more complex issue is the quality of the DTT-reception circuitry. Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns more U.S. TV stations than anyone else other than a network, once criticized the U.S. DTT system for its poor receivability. Earlier this year, however, they praised Zenith's 5th-generation DTT receiver as finally solving the problems. Unfortunately, Zenith's 5th-generation receiver is not yet being sold. Buy an integrated set now, and it won't have that problem-solving circuitry; buy a non-integrated set, and a better receiver can be added later.
If this July 1 hasn't hastened the digital television revolution, there's always July 1, 2005. That's when broadcast-flag circuitry becomes mandatory.
Mark Schubin is an engineering consultant with a diverse range of clients, from the Metropolitan Opera to Sesame Workshop.
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