The Doc Searls Weblog : Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

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Tuesday, January 02, 2007
started 1/2/2007; 6:28:33 AM - last post 1/3/2007; 12:26:19 AM

Doc Searls - Tuesday, January 02, 2007

1/2/2007; 10:28:33 AM (reads: 6567, responses: 8)

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.

Dave started us off with a movie review system where I own and control my data as a prototype example. Hey, let's go make one.

A gratifying bonus link. Another (that indeed makes me want to see Idocracy).

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Ralph Brandi - Re: Tuesday, January 02, 2007

1/2/2007; 9:59:41 PM (reads: 669, responses: 0)

Interesting photo essay. I hope you stuck around to watch that bowl game on Fox, which turned out to be the most interesting football game of the entire bowl season and probably of the entire BCS era.

I watched the Outback Bowl, the wretched Rose Bowl, and the Fiesta Bowl on our three year old analog standard definition 32 inch Toshiba. It looked great. Between the Outback Bowl and the Rose Bowl, my wife and I went over to some friends' house to go out for lunch. They had just gotten a new rear-projection HDTV. They were showing me how great sports looked on it. Honestly, I thought it looked better on my Toshiba. I've seen the same thing on my brother-in-law's set, which is also rear projection. Analog standard definition TV doesn't start to look bad to my eyes until you get to the really big screens, and my family room isn't really big enough to support a really big screen; 32 inches is about right here. So it'll be a while before I get an HDTV set (other than the card in my Linux box which has allowed me to play with it). The other lesson I've learned is to avoid rear projection sets. :-)

You touched on this in one of your shots, but one reason I don't feel compelled to get an HDTV set is the way they get pictures to work on both high-def and standard definition sets. Maybe it's just the years I spent operating a TV camera coming out here, but it seems incredibly difficult to compose a picture that works equally well on both. From a visual standpoint, TV is still composed to work on standard def sets, and it seems rare to me to see compelling composition of a high def picture. Mostly high def just looks like a lot of meaningless empty space on either side of the important stuff. Mostly, that extra space is wasted. For football games, 40 years of watching football on TV has trained me to think that the little scoreboard information thingy that ESPN uses should be up against the side of the screen. On SDTV it is. On HDTV, it looks like it's floating uncomfortably in space. Like I said, maybe it's just me; even most standard def TV doesn't have the composition or mise-en-scene of a great painting. :-)

No doubt this is different for movies, where screen composition is generally in an aspect ratio much closer to the 16:9 ratio of HDTV than it is to the 4:3 ratio of NTSC. When HDTV movies are widely available, I'll have to reconsider.

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DrumsNWhistles - Re: Tuesday, January 02, 2007

1/2/2007; 10:35:31 PM (reads: 663, responses: 5)

Looking at your photoset frustrated me. By the third or fourth time your HD channel had faded out, I was ready to reach through the monitor and scream at the satellite like a crazed banshee.

We moved to HD (though not Sony's flavor...Panasonic for us), too. Camarillo has the same kind of signal issues that SB does, so at least on a temporary basis we are staying with Time Warner cable. My brother-in-law opted for the Verizon FIOS service, which is comparable.

The problem with all of these is a dearth of HD content. With Verizon or Comcast basic, there's 5 or 6 HD offerings and that's it.

However, as a former Rose Parade float decorator and native of Glendale, seeing the Rose Parade in its HD glory was almost as good as camping out on Colorado Blvd like I did in the younger days. I could almost smell the roses. :)

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Doc Searls - Re: Tuesday, January 02, 2007

1/3/2007; 1:24:51 AM (reads: 727, responses: 4)

I wasn't fair, really. It was more fun shooting the problems than the successes. It's really a treat to be able to get over-the-air signals from San Diego, even if they disappear every once in awhile. The satellite problems are partly our own. We need line of sight to all three of Dish's satellites, and can currently only see two (until we move our dish). That gets fixed on the 15th. Meanwhile, we've been Dish customers for almost a decade, and have found them to be pretty darn good for a big faceless company. Tech support usually comes on pretty quick too, especially if you interrupt the robot by punching "0".

For $60 a month we get 29 HD channels. Plus half a dozen from San Diego over the air. Dish does a remarkable job of mixing those in too. Your problem in Camarillo is less easily solvable with an antenna, since the terrain in the direction of Mt. Wilson is highly obstructive; and the locals aren't on the bandwagon yet.

The other problem with cable is that the coaxial wiring system they still use can't really handle HD very well. So they compress the hell out of it. Satellite is much better in this respect, but far from perfect. Verizon's FiOS is better, but still compromised, from what I can tell. Worst of all, their Internet service, while better than alternatives, is highly limited by the bias toward providing TV channels. Where does your brother in law live? I wasn't aware that FiOS was anywhere around here.

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Mike Warot - Re: Tuesday, January 02, 2007

1/3/2007; 4:26:19 AM (reads: 618, responses: 0)

Doc, It occurs to me that the original Napster was a great success because it had an aspect of VRM in it, a built in anonymous music review system, where the user owned and controlled their data (well... ownership was the disputed factor)

If you downloaded a song, and kept it... you endorsed it... the cost of filtering was essentially zero, and the pressure to keep your collection within the bounds of disk space enforced some level of curatorship.

A version of the Napster meme where you simply share the names of your stuff, and a pointer to where to get it legitimately... might be valuable, if it doesn't get gamed.

So... that's my $0.02 for the day...

--Mike--

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DrumsNWhistles - Re: Tuesday, January 02, 2007

1/3/2007; 5:42:58 AM (reads: 755, responses: 3)

My brother-in-law lives in eastern Camarillo -- FiOS is available throughout Camarillo now, and depending on what his experience is, we may move to it. Our neighbors are all Dish customers and love it.

The attraction to Verizon for me is that we already have phone and Internet through them, so it would be easy enough to make the conversion. I just have to get over the block of paying a fortune for TV -- I've been so anti-TV for so long that it seems awful to pay $60/month for television.

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Doc Searls - Re: Tuesday, January 02, 2007

1/3/2007; 5:58:00 AM (reads: 809, responses: 1)

I'd get it just for the Internet speeds.

Verizon needs to know that the Net matters more than TV or phone, because it carries both. They still sell the Net as gravy on TV and phone, which is technically silly, but there it is.

Anyway, what do they charge just for the Net?

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igfire - Re: Tuesday, January 02, 2007

1/3/2007; 9:46:23 AM (reads: 880, responses: 0)