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Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Roses and Thorns on HDTV 
| | Here's a photo essay on watching the Rose Bowl on a high-def TV signal coming 190 miles over the Pacific from San Diego. |
| | Start here. Then click on the small picture over the word "more". Keep doing that. |
| | What's amazing is that the signal we watched, from KGTV, doesn't come from San Miguel Mountain, where most of San Diego's TV transmitters are located; but rather from the much lower Mount Soledad, by La Jolla. Worse, the signal is a directional one, with a deep null to the Northwest: in our direction. |
| | Still, it was a good signal, generally the equal of KPBS, XETV, XHJK, KUSI and KSWB. (The stations that start with X are licensed to Mexico and broadcast from south of the border, over 200 miles from there.) |
| | Several take-aways, so far. |
| | First, all HD signals are highly compressed and sometimes much the uglier for it. I've heard that the over-the-air terrestrial stationsl have the least reason to compress (they're not carrying hundreds of simultaneous data streams), but from what I've seen so far, they're about equal to the satellite streams and better than the cable streams. |
| | Second, it's silly that the FCC (and whatever other legal systems apply) won't let the satellite services carry local stations from outside one's own area. All we get from Dish is low-def locals. So, here in Santa Barbara there are no digital local signals available to us. By a quirk of locality, the only unobstructed view we have toward any over-the-air terrestrial transmitter is across the Pacific at San Diego and Tijuana. My Winegard antenna does a good job, but there are still signal losses. And with digital signals, there is no degrading from clear to snow. The signal breaks up a bit, and then is gone. Reminds me of listening to shortwave or to faraway AM stations at night. |
| | Third, it's surprising how much advertising on HD channels is still in the old 3x4 format instead of the 16x9 widescreen format. Worse, about half the San Diego area HD stations don't bother sending the data for the online program guides. In the program listings, it just says "digital service". That's lame. Seems to me that the local stations could get some big advantages, early in this game, by becoming the leading hi-def stations in their markets. |
| | Fourth, the fact that HD does look sooo much better than regular TV is still a big sell. Movies and sports look especially nice — so nice that they're not really "TV" any more. Seems like an opportunity to break more of the old molds. But I see no sign that anybody is taking much advantage of HD, ouside of sports, Mark Cuban (HDNet), occasional public TV stuff and sources of prettiness such as DiscoveryHD. |
| | Fifth, "live" only makes sense for sports and some news. But much better use of bandwidth can be made by making everything an on-demand download or stream. The market will work better if it's all a la carte too. This totally violates the TV concept, of course (TV="live") but in the long run it's a much better way. |
| | Sixth, the terms "channel", "station", "signal" and "coverage" have become absurd anachronisms. KGTV, known as Channel 10 in San Diego (http://kgtv.com/ redirects to http://www.10news.com), will have to move off that channel and onto the all-digital UHF band after February 2009. So its digital signal is already on UHF. But where? Does it even matter. More on the matter here. |
Right subject, wrong example
| | I clearly kicked a hornet's nest in this piece, where I used Apple's iTunes as an example of DRM that VRM could help us get past. The first three comments immediately busted me for inaccuracies about how Apple's DRM works. |
| | I responded to each comment there below the piece, but I'm not going to go back and change what I said in the first place. The corrections, such as they are, are there; and my main points weren't about Apple's DRM anyway. They were bout how VRM can obviate DRM by offering means to genuine relationships between suppliers and customers. |
| | After the iTunes example, I wrote, |
| | Obviously, there are lots of possibilities here, and that's the point. We need a customer-side angle on solving the problem of providing value on the one hand and limiting abuse on the other. Leaving all this up to the supply side has given us high-friction value-limiting systems that are all a bunch of silos, each of which takes enormous effort (mostly duplicated by each silo) to maintain. Having tools of engagement and independence on the demand side will make markets far more efficient, and likely to grow much faster, for everybody involved. |
| | Dave kindly called the piece exquisite in its imagery, in its wordsmithery, and accurate. But, he added, I don't agree with Doc's recommendation for technology. |
| | He goes on to explain, Any software whose purpose is to copy-protect data, will fail. And gives the example of the DRM in Windows XP, which has copy protection crap that left Dave $200 poorer. He concludes, |
| | So Doc, if you're going to draft a set of rules by which customer-aware companies live, put NO DRM pretty near the top of the list. |
| | That's where I want it too. |
| | By the way, I only chose Apple's DRM as an example because it's relatively familiar to a large number of people. That was a mistake. First, too many people like it (or at least choose to live with the compromises it involves). Second, it's a hugely loaded topic where the convesation can go sideways into lots of black holes. For those reasons and more, I needed to do a lot more research on the details of iTunes' DRM than I did. Mea culpa. My points about VRM, however, stand. |
| | If any of ya'll know some better examples, let's have them. |
There are responses to this message:Re: Tuesday, January 02, 2007, Mike Warot, 1/3/07; 12:26:19 AM Re: Tuesday, January 02, 2007, DrumsNWhistles, 1/2/07; 6:35:31 PM Re: Tuesday, January 02, 2007, Ralph Brandi, 1/2/07; 5:59:41 PM
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