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Cable, TV Makers Agree on Digital Standard
shylock0 writes "Reuters has this article about the digital cable standard agreed upon today. Amazingly enough, it places little or no copyright restrictions on content -- and it even includes specification for 1394/FireWire output to PVRs. I think this is a victory for fair use. Let's hope the FCC approves."
I'm sure this is the lawyers doing, as once the intrested parties realize the lack of attention to such vital details, they'll be at each others throats again, keeping the lawyers fully employed until 2010.
BTW, in case you didn't notice it, also in the news today, AOL quietly was awarded Patents on IM. All very low key and bearing the finest attention and guesswork you can muster.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Not all HDTV or HD-compatible TV owners will be screwed. If you bought a Mitsubishi, then you can upgrade for only a few hundred dollars (Mitsubishi is supposed to have an upgrade unit out soon that will add firewire, an internal decoder, etc to current HD-compatible sets, and I'd be surprised if the same thing or similar won't be available for the HD-ready sets).
Then again, by the time this is all implemented (say, roughly 5 years), it'll be time to buy a new set anyway. The current HD-ready and HD-compatible set owners are not your mom and pop that buy a set and keep it for 20 years (well, okay, except for my parents -- but they got a good deal on their current HD set after their previous non-HD one of 15 years blew up from a lightning strike).
Okay, lots of Slashdot whining, but if you haven't been following events, you're sounding like an idiot.
Okay, currently, DTV (digital television) has 18 transmission settings, some of which are HDTV, some are SDTV (standard NTSC quality but digital), and some are EDTV (480p like an Xbox, Gamecube, or Progressive Scan DVD player). For a few decades, television manufacturers have had to include VHF and UHF decoders. However, most Americans get signals from cable and/or satellite (something like 10%-14% of homes are OTA only). As a result, televisions became "cable-ready" which means that your TV can tune cable channels in. Those hold enough to remember pre-'cable-ready' televisions remember having a cable box that would output on channel 3 or 4, and you'd get your channels that way. Cable-ready benefits everyone. The cable company didn't need to provide boxes, and consumers were happier.
Now, DTV is available OTA. A small handful of regions have HDTV over cable, where your digital cable STB outputs an HDTV signal via DVI, Component Video, or RGB (VGA). Many consumers with HDTV use Satellite, where their HDTV Dish/DirecTV box includes an ATSC (OTA HDTV) decoder. In fact, most OTA decoders are DirecTV boxes as well. This is a matter of economics.
DTV is an MPEG-2 stream, so OTA STBes need to decode MPEG-2 to decode OTA. DirecTV and Dish send in MPEG-2 as well. As a result, adding DirecTV or Dish to an OTA STB is pretty cheap. Dish, however, makes all their own equipment, so many OTA STBes can also get DirecTV. In fact, normally the D* boxes are cheaper, because DirecTV subsidizes DirecTV hardware. Including an OTA-only decoder is a bit silly, so some televisions that are HDTV have a DirecTV decoder built.
While this is great for DirecTV, the 70% of the contry that uses cable is left out in the cold. The FCC mandate for including a decoder was coming, so the television manufacturers were in trouble. They could include an OTA decoder that consumers had no interest in (they get signals from cable, remember), so they couldn't really pass the costs on to consumers. (Manufacturing costs affect supply, not demand, so the price goes up and the quantity sold goes down, w/ manufacturers making less per box, that's no good).
So, while every television could include an integrated DirecTV receiver, that's less beneficial to the manufacturers than a Cable tuner. To make matters worse, the cable companies aren't terribly interested in buying equipment from Motorola to rent to consumers. While they may make some money on the boxes, remember that they have to put the money up to buy it (the debt levels you hear about in telecom), and the box rentals piss off consumers so some of them stay analog.
They are rolling out Digital and have no interest in keeping analog as well, they can get 4-6 SDTV (depending on compression) signals in the space of a single analog station, or ~1 HDTV signal (if the cable companies can compress it a bit more, maybe 1.5 HDTV signals).
Everyone hates eating the costs of two systems. While the television companies have "free" bandwidth, they can't use it. Right now they are maintaining a DTV AND analog transmitter (more money) for no additional viewers (so no extra money), plus they had to buy DTV broadcasting gear.
Everyone wants the DTV changeover to end, so they need to push us to DTV. Once we are all on DTV, they can eliminate the HDTV channels that were the carrot to move us over, and put 4 SDTV signals in the place plus "value added" service like purchasing shit, etc.
So, the cable companies agree to pass along whatever the broadcasters put in that spectrum (or most, or whatever), the broadcasters shut down analog and either offer more channels, services, or HDTV, or something, and the manufacturers get to sell us all new televisions. Consumers get more/better service, either more channels or better quality. Hopefully the satellite companies offer something impressive to compensate for cable matching their previous advantages, and everybody wins.
Of course, rates go up, but c'est la vie.
Alex