Converting to high-definition television
(HDTV), whatever its benefits to American civilization,
would be possibly the most costly modernization ever undertaken
voluntarily. It would far exceed the cost of building the
interstate highways. Even if Americans bought the cheapest
equipment available today, they would need to spend more
than $300 billion just to replace their analog TVs with
ones capable of receiving HDTV. Television stations also
would have to spend tens of billions of dollars for new
equipment. To provide the carrot for this massive conversion,
the federal government has already committed itself to giving
away much of the remaining frequency spectrum to television
stations. The public, as its incentive for converting, will
get a more elongated picture -- using a 16:9 instead of
12:9 ratio of width to height -- that provides better resolution
in newscasts, game shows, reality-based voyeurism, soap
operas, wrestling matches and other entertainments. The
public's gain has been difficult to fully assess because
very few people have ever actually seen regular HDTV broadcasts.
Indeed, until very recently, HDTV was
not broadcast in a form in which most Americans could get
it without an antenna complex. Television stations had little
incentive for broadcasting HDTV, since very few people had
the ability to receive it. So they put it on relatively
obscure UHF stations as a public relations gesture. Unfortunately,
according to tests done by Sinclair Broadcasting, the largest
broadcaster group, indoor antennas would not work without
a direct line of sight to the transmitting antennas, nor
if there was any interference. Further adding to its unavailability,
the cable industry, which did not participate in the spectrum
giveaway and thus had no incentive to show HDTV, declared
that the home cable box was incompatible with it. Similarly,
the satellite narrowcasters, DirectTV and EchoStar, although
digitized, had little reason to launch the new satellites
necessary to carry broader-band HDTV -- at least not until
a significant portion of the public had the hardware to
receive these signals. It was a chicken-and-egg situation:
no sets, no reason to broadcast; no broadcasts, no reason
to buy a set.
Like other concerned citizens, I wanted
to evaluate this new technology. But I was discouraged when
a high-ranking executive at Sony told me that she had considered
having the company install a giant antenna on the roof of
its skyscraper in New York to get HDTV broadcasts for its
showroom, but had found that the cost of providing a reliable
signal was "prohibitive." If Sony, which employs 100,000
engineers and technicians, could not get a reliable HDTV
of its own, what chance had I of getting one in my New York
apartment?
Then, just two weeks ago, I heard through
the Internet grapevine that there might be a means of getting
HDTV free. My proximate source was Bill Cushman, a Houston-based
writer for the video magazine The Perfect Vision, who keeps
close contact with the small but resourceful community of
HDTV seekers. He passed on the rumor that Time Warner was
secretly transmitting HDTV on unused channels of its cable
system in New York, presumably to test it out. To get it,
he suggested, I merely had to discard my cable box and hook
the cable into a HDTV decoder.
I immediately called Time Warner in New
York. The customer representative came on the line and courteously
denied the rumor that there was free HDTV on its cable.
There was now only one way to find out. I bought a RCA Digital
Decoder ($630), which arrived by FedEx the next morning.
I then unplugged the cable from the cable box and replugged
it into the "Antenna A" slot on the HDTV decoder, which
was connected to my Sony HDTV- ready projector. Less than
5 minutes later, I was watching HDTV on two channels, CBS
and (free) HBO. It was in the 16:9 format with Dolby digital
sound (CBS had five channels, HBO only two). To fine-tune
these channels, one needs the service access code for the
RCA decoder. Fortunately, like many other codes, it is available
on the Internet.
Then, to find out what was available
over the airwaves as opposed to cable, I mounted an eight-foot
UHF ChannelMaster antenna on my roof, which I plugged into
the "Antenna B" slot on the RCA decoder. After getting a
number of tips from the Internet -- including the useful
site at www.antennaweb.org1, which draws a street map from
your address showing the precise path to all obtainable
digital stations -- I got WNYW, the Fox digital station.
According to Internet tipsters, I might also get WTNH, the
ABC digital station in New Haven, Conn., and WNJT, the PBS
digital station in Trenton, N. J., under the right weather
conditions. But at present I can count on only three digital
stations, and not everything they broadcast is converted
to HDTV. Nevertheless, the material that is broadcast in
HDTV -- especially the CBS programs for which Mitsubishi
paid to convert and the 16:9 formatted movies on HBO --
provide an ample opportunity to assess this new technology.
There can be no doubt that HDTV renders
a picture that is vastly superior to the one on conventional
television. HDTV uses roughly 500,000 color pixels; conventional
television uses the equivalent of about 50,000. Consider,
for example, a picture of 100,00 people at a political demonstration.
On HDTV, each person could be represented by five different
color pixels, which could show them with multiple color
outfits and banners. Conventional television would have
to use one color pixel to represent every two persons, turning
them into a blur. Suddenly, it becomes possible to see individually
tinted hairs on a head or weeds on a baseball diamond. This
cumulatively adds up to the illusion of depth, complexity
and three-dimensionality. It is, in a word, fabulous.
The price for this new diversion and
deception is relatively steep. Unfortunately, smaller HDTV
receivers, which cost more than $2,000 (without the decoder),
will not provide the full virtual-reality illusion (unless
one sits only a few inches away at the risk of one's vision).
So one needs a projection HDTV receiver costing between
$4,000 and $8,000, as well as a decoder (another $600 to
$1,000.) Then there is the cost of getting a signal. Unless
one can tap into one's local cable for HDTV, as I did, one
will have to invest in some sort of rooftop antenna farm
or at least a satellite dish. Of course, there is the risk
that HDTV will be abandoned once television stations get
full title to their digital licenses. (Stations can pack
four non-HDTV digital channels in the space required for
one HDTV channel.) But why not see HDTV while the opportunity
nobly provided by Time Warner still exists? If, of course,
you can afford it.
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