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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?"
Canadialand is the Nintendo of countries: Graphics simply do not matter.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Good gosh, HDTV would fly by itself if the industry practiced a little common sense about the rollout. I remember in 1998 a sales guy trying to talk me into buying a sexy looking HDTV on demo on the floor. Yeah, I was drooling.
This unit came sans tuner, and the universe as we know it was still pretty much standard definition tv, i.e., if you could find any HD content, it was for eye candy only, nobody was broadcasting HD anywhere on anything remotely regular.
I told him I'd wait for the prices to come down, and the for some content to show up -- he shook his finger at me, "These prices [$10,000 for the unit I was looking at] won't come down and might go up! And, there's more and more new HD content available every day"
Prices went way down (though still way too high) and content eventually showed up. The problem? Way too many ways to set up for HD with way too many ways to find out your setup isn't correct after spending big bucks.
The minefield that is setting up for HD is too confusing, too expensive, and yeah, if I were an advertiser I'd find it a tough sell to pay any extra for an uncertain market.
It's too bad, I eventually settled on a Samsung 50" DLP a 2 years ago, absolutely LOVE it, but no thanks to any help I got from anyone anywhere! Freak, even the Comcast HD cable box is still a piece of garbage that regularly freezes, never behaves, and offers a very limited range of HD (not entirely their fault, come on networks!).
Toss in the confusing choices and still uncertain future of HD on DVD, sheesh, it's a wonder the market is as penetrated as it is.
Hey, and toss in the $50 HDMI cable lots of people have to buy, they didn't even know about it until "after". Yeah, and what about the almost non-existent HD On Demand (another unfulfilled promise... aside from incredibly poor selection, Comcast's On Demand movies have only a few HD, and all of them (HD and standard) are so compressed, it hurts to watch on a good TV). Oh, and don't forget, or don't forget to plan for, DRM. Don't assume what's true today will still be true by the time you set up your system, but assume if it's not the same it's going to be more restrictive.
Shit, the more I prattle, the less I like about HD. I'm in as deep as I want for what the market has offered so far, but am not chomping at the byte for any more investment until the industry sorts itself out.
Or do they not matter in all this?
1) I much prefer to watch HD programming. Especially sports. I will not watch SD football
2) All of the HDTV I watch is over the air.
3) I'm still in a bad mood since my local PBS station decided to only broadcast about 4 hours of HD programming each day.
That said, I'm not saying that HD commands higher ad rates - but it should. Too bad HD programming usually has SD commercials.
Not going HD would be like cable companies saying "No need for us to build high speed infrastructure - everybody likes dial-up."
My other sig is funny.
The number of people who actually watch tv is falling. Thanks to the internet, we don't need tv, so why would we need HDTV?
RCA pushed it because they could. that's what RCA did in those days, late 30s and post-war and the early 50s.
HDTV is the same thing. the manufacturers have an interest. it's a paradigm shift for broadcasters, and it will cannabilize their existing businesses, just like TV did, and color TV was just a gawd-awful money eater for stations in the 1960s.
but the FCC wants to sell those juicy frequencies near the cell phone bands, and congress spent the money a thousand times over, so your present TV system (NTSC, PAL, SECAM, doesn't matter) is headed down the dumper for HDTV versions.
that's how the future works. you can go into your back room and play your edison cylinders now... at least, the ones that aren't all fuzzy black mold by now. most folks eventually fall for pretty pictures and better sounds.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Yep, fair call, nobody wants to pay more for it, suprise suprise suprise.
Do it the way that everyone else does it when they are financially constrained, buy HD when the life cycles end. So the cameras and other stuff that CBC would normally replace every 2 years (Provided they act like the other TV stations I know), go HD then. The video editing suite, that will eventually need to be upgraded (Usually happens every 4 - 5 years), do it then. Most people that do digital content creation pay for themselves (Make a profit) anyway, so just tell them they need to HD and then go back to playing golf.
Yes, there are financial constraints to going HD, but then there are financial constraints to running a business too. Over the next few years everyone else will be replacing kit, and they will be buying HD which means that sooner or later, everything that CBC gets given for broadcast is going to be HD.
25%, quite possibly now, that's fine, but in the future, everything is going to be HD and CBC aren't going to have an option as few people will be providing SD equipment to purchase. IF it's there, it will cost more money and won't be standard with the rest of the kit.
Really, this is a null and void arguement that they make that everyone else is going through.
Upgrading kit and increasing the quality of the standard broadcast costs a LOT of money, I know this all too well. Considering however that a major overhaul like this hasn't gone through the industry for 30 years in most countries, the amount of expenditure up front to move now is scaring people. It's the same with Vista and Office 2007 and everything else.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
New cameras, modulators, multiplexers, etc...
To give you an idea, you need 1 ATSC modulator per channel per transmittion tower. Each modulator is in the range of $10000. So we're talking hundreds of millions to convert.
What a pantload this guy is. Sales of HDTV's to consumer illustrate quite strongly that they are willing to pay for HD content. People like me who have HDTV's avoid watching SD because of the poor picture quality.
Many cable and stellite companies charge extra for HD channels - and people pay up. So if he wants to charge delivery companies extra for HD programming, well there is your friggen business case, on a silver platter.
DOH.
I don't know about you, but unless I'm watching exclusively girl-on-girl porn (and even then), there are some things I absolutely do NOT need to see in all their HD glory.
Having decomissioned my TV a number of years ago in favor of a computer running emule, and now having the free upgrade to BitTorrent that allows me to get my american TV shows add-free 2 weeks ahead of the Australian commercial-infected air-date rather than 1 week ahead.. TV Execs should be asking themselves Is there actually a business case for traditional TV?
:) I recon' I'd even pay to see that...
Now, as for HD-TV...
I just witnessed a 277-run ashes victory against in full SD Digital TV, and the step up from shadowed fuzzy PAL broadcast was unbelievable.
I can't wait to see us beat the Poms in 1080p full color
I wonder how long it'll take the sports ground owners to start sueing broadcasters for loss of revinue because you get a better view of the game at home than you do with 10x binoculars from front-row seats?
Um, don't you think there is an upper bound on the resolution you want on some images? When you start seeing every pimple, hair, and pore, I would think it stops being fantasy-enhancing and starts becoming a clinical rotation in urology or perhaps skin lesions.
And since pornography isn't doing it, the Government in the United States stepped in and mandated it. Nobody wanted it otherwise.
Thus the original article is correct- there's no business case for it, that's why the FCC mandated it.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Never seen a compression artifact have you?
The transmission media has nothing to do with compression artifacts.
Or higher error rates on an ethernet segment?
I've never seen any where the network was set up competently, no. A $5 HDMI cable would have to be really crappy to not have a 0% error rate between two systems that are only a few feet apart.
Show me a major network that refuses to broadcast in HD and I will show you a network that will be irrelevant in 5 years.
An improved technology isn't going to take off unless the _average_ consumer, buying _average_ equipment, and setting it up without special expertise, gets results that are so dramatic that everyone who sees it says "Wow!"
Color TV was that way, even with all the problems initially. Circa 1960, color TVs were fabulously expensive, persnickety, tricky to set up, had to be set up again if you moved them to a different location within the house, were tricky to tune, tended to shift color from one program to another, etc. But if you had a friend who was rich enough to afford one, you took one look at it and you said "Wow! I wannit I wannit I wannit!" So what if Dinah Shore's face changed from greenish to magentaish as she walked across the stage?
Of course, it didn't really take off until prices came down and they had solid-state circuits that didn't drift and could fudge the colors a bit so that anything close to flesh was displayed as flesh...
Technologies that are only impressive under good conditions usually fail. Right now, that's the state HDTV is in.
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Agreed. when you want to run 20'-100' HDMI cable spend the big bucks on good HDMI cable. Otherwise? Save your money. If you want to spend it, buy a better receiver. Even when it comes to speaker cable, don't waste your money on monster cable. Buy generic OFC in bulk and make your own since you probably can't even measure let alone hear any difference.
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HD is happening, and the adoption rate both for consumers, content creators, and broadcasters is accelerating. I have seen MUCH acceleration in 2006, and I think 2007 will be the year HD really takes command of the market. Let me put it this way -- perhaps the SUITS at broadcast organizations can't find a case for HD. But I will tell you this -- the engineers, editors, etc. are VERY MUCH ready for HD, and know it is happening, and there's no looking back. This isn't really up for debate, it's the fact of the matter.
What I find a little strange about this guy's comments is that he's basically trying to justify keeping a 50-year-old broadcast standard, well into the 21st century. Let's think about that for a moment -- what would have happened if the computer industry had decided to stay with, say, the standards that were in place for computing in the 1950s, through today. Yeeeaaaah... As bizarre as this scenario sounds, this is the reality that the broadcast market has perpetuated for the last 50 years or so. I would think that consumers would be demanding a much quicker adoption of HD! Oh, so you need to buy a new TeeVee set? Me cry you a river. That's like saying I should be forced to use a building-sized supercomputer that runs on punchcards to handle basic arithmetic problems, just because you don't feel you should need to upgrade your computer. But it's even more ridiculous than that, because we tolerate "needing" to buy a new computer every 5 years or so, but sheesh, needing to upgrade your TV once per fifty years? IT'S A TRAVESTY!
And on another note -- if those idiots can't command higher ad rates for HD advertisements, well, please fire them and hire me to do your HD advertising sales, because your current ad sales team SUCKS and is not worth what you're paying them. I am pretty certain I could do a better job myself. And I'm not just throwing that out there -- again, I make my living largely "selling" video content producers on HD.
Finally, another interesting debate/issue concerns the video/post/broadcast world's move to tapeless workflows, where you are essentially recording video _files_ right onto flash RAM/hard drives/optical discs/SANs/etc. And video tapes go the way of the dodo. This is another HUGE shift in the broadcast market, which is only recently incorporating "IT technologies" into the systems that drive broadcast facilities. A lot of broadcasters are going to go for "two for the price of one" -- let's go tapeless, and let's make sure our upgrades are HD-capable at least.
OK OK, one laaast point -- anyone who doesn't feel HD is a worthwhile upgrade SERIOUSLY needs to get their eyes checked. I recommend doing an A/B comparison between SD and HD, of the same content. HD is only truly profound when you _go back_ to SD, and you ask yourself, how the hell did I deal with this shit for so long? BRING ON MORE HD!!!
It's not the HD programs that make the bizcase. What makes the bizcase are ever more giant TVs. Which need HD so they don't look crappy when you sit right in front of them. Which therefore need HD programs. Which advertisers will advertise on, because anyone living by the rule "do whatever your mother warned you never to do" is the ideal target market for any product.
Damn socialist Canadians, with their sanity. Their country needs bigger TVs, just to make it look full and warm it up. Where else are the black squirrels supposed to hide when American tourists and Japanese hunters come looking for them as the ice melts?
--
make install -not war
I buy only the very best MONSTER Cat5 cable. Otherwise, my tubes go slow. =(
The problem is its "HD".... I am NOT GOING TO BUY a damn thing until its NO LONGER HD, but is the new standard-definition.
As long as they can keep using the two magic letters "HD", they will keep charging stupid idiots more just for those 2 letters.
When the ONLY TV's available are all HD, then I will replace my old 27"incher.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
Another thing that I think that the TV industry is ignoring are the rapidly growing number of -zero- TV households. I didn't know anybody without a TV 10 years ago. Now, I don't know anybody who watches TV (broadcast, cable, or otherwise) except my parents. I know that that may be pretty unusual right now, but it was completely unheard of not too long ago. The slow uptake of HDTV in the US may have something to do with a silent but growing number of people who simply won't buy another TV again... ever.
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.
A few stations and big networks tried that with Comcast. They instantly dropped the channels COUNTRY WIDE with a channel in place with text that said "**CHANNELNAME** is trying to charge you to watch their content and their commercials. call X-XXX-XXX-XXXX and let them know how you feel.
it lasted one day. Several local channels tried it 5 years ago and bent over instantly when they had their plug pulled with a warning message on the channel. Discovery tried it to comcast 3 years ago as well and gave up 2 days later.
CBC has no chance, if they start charging, they get dropped and then they wither away. Boo hoo that the studios have to upgrade their technology from 20 year old hardware and that the customers think they shouldn't pay more for it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Take the source into consideration: CBC is the publically-funded national broadcast network of Canada, and its ratings are the pits across the board. Its one cash cow (and only real HDTV-showoff program), Hockey Night in Canada, is rumoured to be headed to private networks CTV and TSN next season. Conservatives are in power federally, and consider the CBC an adversary. Add it all up, and the CBC is staring at a cash crunch in the near future. They won't have the money to upgrade much of their programming to HDTV, so they blow smoke to the regulator that there's no business case for it.
From what I've heard from my family at least, there was a somewhat similar argument over color broadcasts when they first started appearing. Now, I realize that in such a situation, things were a much less severe change, but even so, try to look at it from this point of view: The better the image on the screen looks, the more likely it is to hold someone's attention. If that weren't the case, nobody would pay to clear up those 'fuzzy channels' at the end of the dial.
The metaphorical dial, of course. If your TV has a dial, you need to kill yourself. Preferably through starvation, from the debt of buying an HDTV.
Actually there is a business case for it.
Only it has nothing to do with television, and everything to do with the FCC being able to auction off all the old television bandwidth to wireless carriers.
And yes, I do have that in writing.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The FCC didn't mandate HDTV. They mandated digital broadcasts. Digital does not imply HD.
The reason? Analog broadcast TV takes up a huge chunk of very desirable radio spectrum space. Digital broadcasts can transmit more data in a smaller frequency range.
I would venture to guess, that in the US, the overwhelming majority of people are still watching analog television.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I for one can't wait to have my TV filled up with HD MPEG2 artifacts instead of this clean SD crap!
I dunno, I sometimes wonder if most people even care. I've seen far too many people watch SD programming all stretched out on their new wide screen TV to believe that they actually give a shit about extra resolution. They just go to the store and buy whatever teh salesman is pushing that day. Nothing too expensive, mind you, but nothing too cheap (SD) either. They pay extra for the illusion of higher quality and then go home and set their TV to stretch an SD picture to fit the 16:9 screen... like they dont' even notice that it is distorted! WTF?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
mandated terrestrial broadcast of HD content in the US
No, they mandated digital broadcasting, not HD broadcasting. You can get your SD channels over the air digitally. This had nothing to do with promoting new technology and better TV picture quality for consumers, and everything to do with reducing bandwidth consumption so they could sell off the old analog spectrum. This was not an altuistic move on the part of the FCC.
Not that I'm complaining, of course. I love my HDTV.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The only people wondering that are the pasty guys glued to their TVs. Everyone else knows the difference between live and Memorex.
Yep. The difference between live and Memorex is that my HDTV costs the same as season tickets to my favorite football team, and I don't have to pay to fly all over the country to watch them every Sunday. Plus, the beer is cheaper at home, too!
Any fragment of imaginary and/or entertainement work, political, and religion in any form and media : book, music, tv show, film, games (p&p, board, computer & console) is a fragment of our culture and of the Zeit-Geist, whether of good or bad quality by your own personal feeling. This is roughly the only way you live your culture, or at least what is left of it for the next generation. How else do youn want to live it in ? Talk with friends ? That aren't culture per see. Go out of visit the world ? Ain't it either.
And like the gp said, this is where the steal of our culture kick in : all those piece of CULTURE, were supposed to come back to us the PUBLIC after we the public granted them a TEMPORARY monopoly on selling their stuff. Alas for anything done during your lifetime now, it will never come back during your life time as public domain, and maybe not even to your children, to your grand children. Thus a stealing organized by lobyying. The fact that it was m,ade into a law doesn't change the fact that only 1 stackholder was involved and the other stackholder (the public) was taken its goody gainst its will. In my culture we call that stealing.
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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.
--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
>It's not an early adopter device any more, but it hasn't even come close to reaching critical mass in the general populace yet.
There's a marketing book that's worth reading, and it's about this exact situation. Products do not move smoothly from early adopters to early majority. There's a pit in between the two that many products fall into.
The book, "Crossing the Chasm", explains that you have to make the transition to your new product as smooth and slick as teflon on teflon, or normal people will never generate good word of mouth. An example of a brilliant success at this is the Toyota Prius, which spends a significant amount of software simulating the artifacts of a 20th-century car, just to allow buyers to slide right into it without an adjustment.
If the HD industry were poised for success you'd see plug-and-play installations that didn't require setup by a consultant, no obstructive DRM, and standardized cabling.
I have a fairly high end HD projection setup. I'd never want to go back. I rarely, and by that I mean maybe once a month, view anything in standard broadcast formats. No point to it. Looks like crap on toast. Cold, unbuttered, burned toast. Every time I read about someone saying that HD "isn't all that", I just laugh quietly. My system drops jaws on a regular basis when we have visitors, and it could be better yet. And... it will be. :)
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