No Business Case for HDTV?

Lev13than writes "The head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation argues that there is no business model for HDTV. Speaking at a regulatory hearing being held by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), CBC president Robert Rabinovitch noted that 'There's no evidence either in Canada or the United States that we have found for advertisers willing to pay a premium for a program that's in HD.' In order to cope with infrastructure and programming costs that are roughly 25 per cent higher, Rabinovitch proposes that the CBC start charging cable and satellite companies to carry their signal, and to limit over-the-air transmission. HDTV — good for Best Buy, bad for broadcasters?"

Comments

Chicken and egg

[Sparohok]

HDTV is a classic case of chicken and egg. Without an installed base, the industry has no incentive to produce and broadcast HD content. Without content, on the other hand, there will be no installed base. You can't blame the broadcasters for following their financial incentives, any more than you can blame consumers for rejecting high priced HDTV hardware on which they had nothing to watch.

Fortunately, broadcasters, unlike consumers, are beholden to federal regulators and can be coerced. The FCC saw this chicken-and-egg problem coming and mandated terrestrial broadcast of HD content in the US. The Canadians should do the same. If you broadcast SD, you have to broadcast HD as well.

Anyway, none of this matters anymore. HDTV is finally a done deal. Between the US tuner mandate, HD capable enabled game consoles, and the price trajectory of LCD flat panels, consumer adoption of HDTV is unstoppable. Advertisers and broadcasters will be dragged along soon enough.

Re:There are NO 5$ HDMI cables due to bad HDMI spe

[EtherMonkey]

I recently bought a projector that took HDMI, that is when I startedlooking for HDMI cables. Turns out the cheapest HDMI cable 3ft is for 30$-40$. if u want anything longer, your are looking at 100$ plus. Researching more I discovered that reason for this is the specs, strangly yes, the specs. An article I read says the HDMI spec (an off shoot of DVI) was designed by computer engnineers and not video engineers. HDMI uses 4 twisted pair with no error correction (unlike TCP/IP) to send real time data and has a huge bandwidth requirements (HDTV). if they were video engineers they would have choosen coaxial. Anyhow, due to this, there are complications in the manufacturing of HDMI cables and achieving 100 ohm impedence is a big issue on these twisted pair cables.

You mean this $7.69 HDMI cable cannot exist? And that this 16 foot HDMI cable for $29.99 is a figment of my imagination??? Eghads! How in the world was I ever able to get a usable signal from my home theater?

Perhaps that's because you should have spent more time researching, or at least talking to a real expert, and not the pimply-faced sales droid at your local electronics store who will spin more lies in pursuit of that 75% premium cable profit margin than a politician chasing re-election.

And, by the way, comparing HDMI to TCP/IP is like comparing Apples to Stainless Steel Cookware. And TCP/IP does not demand error correction (UDP is best effort). But TCP/IP does run over Ethernet or Token-Ring, either of which can run over 100-Ohm UTP. In fact, TCP/IP over GB-Ethernet on 4-pair 100-Ohm UTP has sufficient bandwidth to carry multiple real-time HDTV feeds up to 100 meters.

Finally, there is nothing magical about making 100 Ohm UTP cable. It's been around for dozens of years and is the most common specification. It is certainly MUCH SUPERIOR FOR CARRYING DIGITAL SIGNALS compared to coaxial cable, which attenuates and degrades the digital waveforms over distance due to its inherent capacitance characteristics.

I will concur that HDMI cables longer than 30 feet are unheard of, and that this is because of the specification. Every network standard has distance limitations. It's a trade-off between performance, convenience and cost. In defense of the standards team I can only say that most people tend to put their TV and tuner/dvd/etc on the same side of their house. Sort of like putting the oven in the kitchen with the fridge. But I'm kind of conservative that way.