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US DTV Patent Royalties Are $24–$40
shiroobi writes "Wow! $24-40 USD a pop? This would seem to mean that every TV is already marked up with this cost now that ATSC tuners are required. Looks like Vizio is fighting something like this already against Funai."
If the FCC mandates that all television must be broadcast in digital they either A) Need to remove that requirement, B) Have someone invalidate the patent or C) Buy the patent and release it to the public. This is nothing more than government assisted extortion.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
ATSC added to the already large sum of patent royalties required. ATSC is under the "Mpeg2" header, since MPEG-2 is part of the ATSC standard. the "MPEG-LA" header is for all other licenses owned by the Licensing Authority that are required in DTVs.
There's a thing that has nothing to do with ATSC called Wi-LAN in there too.
Look at the chart -- Wi-LAN charges $0.65 per TV to put in a V-Chip, which is federally mandated in all new TVs.
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It is well established that public airwaves are subject to strict regulation, for example to exclude obscenity. It doesn't make sense to allow private entities to charge fees of their choosing to anyone who wants to receive these airwaves. It would be fine to patent one particular implementation of the decoder, but not all or most realistic implementations. The standard should have been chosen with royalty-free interoperability in mind. Now that the die is cast, the patents involved should be nationalized under eminent domain and owner compensated for development expenses and risks, but not $25 for every TV in America.
Well, hey, if we didn't all pay for V-Chips then parents would have to pay more per V-Chip. Isn't the purpose of non-breeders to financially subsidize all those fertile people who managed the herculean task of rutting without birth control?
I think this might finally explain something I observed when preparing for the switchover. I was trying to find a VCR/DVD recorder with an ATSC tuner so I could record programs. (A converter box->regular VCR setup doesn't work well because the VCR doesn't have the ability to tell the converter box to change channels.)
I couldn't find anything in a low end VCR. All of the low end VCRs or DVD recorders were all tuner-free. You had to go up to the mid- to high-range models before you found one with a tuner, and even then it was hit-or-miss. Contrast that with VCR buying 3-5 years ago, where even the lowest of low end VCR had an integrated NTSC tuner.
At the time I thought it was a reflection of changing viewing habits, that no one was using VCRs to record television shows anymore, but it makes sense that if you need to spend $25-40 on just ATSC licensing fees, you'll just drop the tuner, or would only put it into more expensive models.
(BTW, I finally went crazy, bought an ATSC capture card and converted an old computer into a MythTV box. It's slicker and arguably better than a VCR, but with more headaches and frustrations.)
The government is footing the bill for the patent fees. The consumer then pays the actual cost of the device.
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People even say a computer is junk without a bluray, and as a toy it probably is.
Show me these people. I wish to mock them. Seriously, a Blu-ray drive is about seven times the cost of a plain ol' DVD drive, and doesn't really come with a lot of advantages. Sure, you can play a Blu-ray disk. Except for this one fellow I know who found that his drive could only play SOME disks. Solution? Wait for a firmware upgrade. And wait. And wait. At least he hadn't bought an HD-DVD drive, right?
The prime disadvantage of the cutting edge is that sometimes you get cut. Once Blu-ray gets cheap and the drive quality levels out more, it might be worth it. But even then, some people just can't see any difference in quality and thus no reason to go Blu-ray. And then there's people like me, who use their DVD drives for burning data disks only.
DVD licensing fees are STILL quite high, and all the money goes to Toshiba, who own the patents. Toshiba's patent trolling is why blu-ray exists.
Toshiba built HD-DVD on top of their existing patent portfolio, and unilaterally altered the rules of the trade association charged with helming DVD's future, the DVD Forum, in order to push through adoption of their arguably-inferior standard over Sony's more advanced, more open, less expensive competing proposal.
Sony, Panasonic, and several other key players walked rather than spend another hardware generation paying through the nose to Toshiba, and formed their own standards body to back Sony's proposed spec.
Thus the format war was born: Toshiba's standard was named HD-DVD, and Sony's Blu-Ray. For once, Sony was the company that had the widely supported, more open standard. This is why you only saw Toshiba HD-DVD players, while dozens of companies were making blu-ray players.
Mind you, they're both closed formats, but of the two, HD-DVD was way more evil. The lesser evil definitely won in that case.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Do a rescan on June 12 when all of them go to full digital and begin DTV broadcasts on new frequencies and higher power levels. After June 12, you may find that you are able to receive more channels.
If not, try a better antenna. If that doesn't work, then get upset. But at least wait until June 12 to write it off.
FWIW, I used to live in Baltimore but WDCA-20 was what we watched, with rabbit ears and and old UHF loop antenna. It may have had snow and static but we liked it better than channel 45. Fun memories.
It's kinda sad that kids coming up now won't know about those experiences. First TVs came with blue screens to politely mask the static and hidden faint signals, and now, there won't really be any faint signals. No more catching the show on the distant TV station because your local one won't carry it. It's a shame.
Sig for hire.
The first US color TVs in 1954 cost the equivalent of nearly $8000 in today's money, for a 14" screen.
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>>>After June 12, you may find that you are able to receive more channels.
Bzzzz. I've already examined the pre and post-transition stations. NONE of my stations are boosting their levels. In fact, one of them (WBAL-DT) is actually going to a lower level such that they will disappear completely from my screen. So my channel count's going to drop even further than I indicated previously.
Also I'm not the only one in that boat. According to tvfool.com's report and computer simulation, the average American home will lose 3 stations when analog stops, and about 3 million people will lose their television reception completely (no channels). For whatever reason digital is harder to receive than the old analog signal.
Thanks Congress.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Toshiba built HD-DVD on top of their existing patent portfolio, and unilaterally altered the rules of the trade association charged with helming DVD's future, the DVD Forum, in order to push through adoption of their arguably-inferior standard over Sony's more advanced, more open, less expensive competing proposal.
Ok, I used to work in the industry, and that is probably the most biased and uninformed opinion I've heard. Let's break this down:
Toshiba built HD-DVD on top of their existing patent portfolio,
And Sony didn't do the same with Blu-Ray?
and unilaterally altered the rules of the trade association charged with helming DVD's future, the DVD Forum,
Citation needed. The DVD Forum has 159 registered members as of 2008, according to Wikipedia. Looking at the structure of it, I have trouble seeing how any one company could alter the rules.
In fact, reading to Sehnsucht's post, it actually looks like a reasonable change. What is the point of counting an 'abstain' as a no?
in order to push through adoption of their arguably-inferior standard over Sony's more advanced
At launch, Blu-Ray had no implementations of any sort of network access, even on the PS3. Any players other than the PS3 had absolutely abysmal performance, due to the use of Java for everything -- a simple animation, sliding a menu in that would cover a tiny portion of the screen, had to be redrawn in chunks, painfully slowly. No mandatory network, no mandatory local storage, I'm not even sure they had picture-in-picture support.
By contrast, HD-DVD had most of the features Blu-Ray was planning, but actually required and implemented in the first Toshiba players. I'm talking about a small amount of local storage, an ethernet port, picture-in-picture, scripting always enabled, and menus were written in Javascript, wrapped around an animation API that was presumably much lower-level -- menus slid smoothly onto and off of the screen, with nice translucency effects. There was a drawing API if needed, but we didn't need it.
And yes, Javascript is a better language than Java. Javascript is very Lisp-y, whereas Java is like C++, only worse.
Oh, and there's the technological advantage that an existing DVD factory can be upgraded to HD-DVD, easily.
The only technological advantage of Blu-Ray was better bandwidth and storage. But with people producing for both, the HD-DVDs generally were shipped dual-layer (30 gigs), while the Blu-Ray discs were shipped single-layer (25 gigs). No one was using that extra space, and if they were using the extra bandwidth, I sure as hell couldn't tell.
more open,
HD-DVD used only AACS for its DRM, and had no region coding. Blu-Ray used AACS and BD+, and was region-coded. Given that I consider both DRM and region coding to be evil and anti-consumer, HD-DVD is certainly the more open in that sense.
less expensive
For the manufacturers? Maybe, but as I said, there's that advantage of being able to upgrade existing DVD hardware, so there has to be some advantage. But looking at the price of movies at the time, HD-DVDs were generally cheaper, and HD-DVD players were cheaper and better than Blu-Ray players. I never saw a $100 Blu-Ray player, ever -- indeed, as I understand it, the PS3 is the cheapest to this day.
This is why you only saw Toshiba HD-DVD players, while dozens of companies were making blu-ray players.
The Toshiba players were cheap, and there was also the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive. I have no idea if it was Toshiba inside, but the Xbox itself certainly didn't use any code from Toshiba. And there seemed to be all kinds of third-party software players.
Contrast this to Blu-Ray -- cheapest was the PS3, and it still didn't have all the features the Toshiba player did (like network access -- even though the PS3 is wired, yo
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This is really an old story, actually a continuation of the NTSC/PAL battles. VSB is the acronym for vestigial sideband, a variation of the modulation scheme used for NTSC. Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (COFDM) is a different and more complex modulation scheme used by Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) in Europe and Japan. The general consensus at the time (way back in the last millennium) was that OFDM was better for penetration but the receivers were more expensive. VSB had a greater service area but could not handle noise (especially reflections) as well. In Europe and Japan, there are more large concentrations of people and DVB/COFDM made more sense.
THE REAL REASON, however, was that European companies owned the patents on COFDM, and Zenith had the patent on VSB-8 (some say 8-VSB, 8 for the number of levels of signal amplitude used, there is also a 16-level version for cable that was never used). So, America "bought American" and chose Zenith's solution. Later, LG Electronics bought Zenith. LOL!
Note: Bell Labs patented OFDM in 1966, but Philips and STM wrote patents covering DVB COFDM in 1987. I am sure there are others too.