Technology360

PBS stations: time to graduate from the HD feed

Around the first of the year, a friend wrote to ask what our plans were for using our HD channels (among other things, I manage two PBS stations in eastern Washington).  His station and our full-service station are using the PBS HD feed exclusively.  I hadn't really thought about it much, but his question coincided with my own acquisition of a new 5th-gen. ATSC set-top box, one that could actually receive most of the Spokane stations at my home some 55 miles away, so this prompted me to reconsider my assumptions about HD.

The PBS HD feed is a packaged feed that provides a high-quality 7x24 program service that either has true HD or upconverted analog programs.  Stations that air the HD feed exclusively are airing identical programs localized only (usually) by a bug and station IDs.  Most stations are airing it on their digital dot-1 channel and are airing an SD version of their analog channel on dot-2, but there are variations.

Meanwhile, commercial practice is to simulcast their analog channel on dot-1, the digital version being HD when available and upconverted analog programs when it's not.  While not true HD, these upconverted programs look darn good in contrast to SD.  And this better looking (assuming you're viewing on an appropriate set) clone of their analog channel is run on their dot-1 channel position.  Some commercial stations in our market are running an additional SD channel (full-time weather or music videos), some aren't.

The HD feed was a great strategy for gaining HD digital cable carriage, but it's a non-starter for gaining HD satellite carriage.  It's just not reasonable to think that satellite providers are going to dedicate the bits necessary for dozens of our local-into-local HD services that are differentiated only by a bug and station ID.

More importantly, it's not a great strategy for retaining over-the-air viewers (an over-the-air viewer is economically worth several times more to a station than DBS or cable viewers).  Viewers form habits.  If programs are lined up differently on the PBS station versus the way they are lined up on several commercial stations, guess which way seems right to them.  And if what looks to them to be the main channel because it's HD has only light local branding, no underwriting and -- forgive me -- no pledge drives, then we're not going to compensate for that with the inferior quality of our fully-localized SD simulcast of analog up on dot-2.  It's also confusing to viewers to having similar programs running at similar times -- the most extreme case was finding two different versions of Frontline running in the same primetime slot a few weeks ago.

It's important to note that this strategy likely brings extra hardware and operating expenses.  Also, as two of our most astute technologists, David Liroff of WGBH and David Felland of Milwaukee Public Television, have noted in important Current articles (not yet available online, but see the former's "DTV channel options: How much to mux?" in the 12 Feb. 2007 issue and the latter's "We've got to clean up our act in high-definition" in the 12 Mar. 2007 issue), upconverting non-HD programs is an inefficient use of our available digital capacity.

So while I agree we'd be much better off if our HD channel was truly HD, it's not something we can expect any time soon.  We have two years to retain or even expand our base of over-the-air viewers before the Feb. 2009 analog shut off or we're going to suffer a big economic hit then.  And we may have no more than that gain local-into-local DBS carriage of our HD channel also.

Let's work on both goals in tandem, but I think conforming our digital offerings to commercial practice is our most urgent task heading into 2009.  --Dennis

Jake Shapiro on Digital Distribution

Jake Shapiro runs the innovative Public Radio Exchange and was involved in the public radio Digital Distribution Consortium for the past several months (and mentioned in an earlier post of mine and also by Stephen Hill).  He's given an interview on the DDC to the public broadcasting newspaper, Current, and reproduced it in his weblog.  Check it out.  Link:  Jake Shapiro blogs sometimes.  --Dennis

NTIA Releases Final Rule on DTV Converter Box Coupon Program

From the National Telecommunications and Information Administration web site:

NTIA Releases Final Rule on Digital Television Converter Box Coupon Program: The converter box coupon program will assist Americans in receiving over-the-air broadcast television programming when full-power television stations cease analog broadcasting after February 17, 2009.
• Press Release [ -- HTML -- MS Word -- Acrobat PDF -- ]
• Final Rule on Digital Television Converter Box Coupon Program
   [ -- HTML -- WordPerfect -- Acrobat PDF (167Kb) -- ]
• Digital TV Fact Sheet for Consumers (Acrobat PDF 181 Kb)
• Digital TV Fact Sheet for Retailers (Acrobat PDF 178 Kb)
• Digital TV Fact Sheet for Manufacturers (Acrobat PDF 242 Kb)
• Digital Television Transition & Public Safety Web Site
Posted 03-12-2007

See also John Eggerton's, Initial Converter Box Bucks Cover All Analog Sets.  Link:  Broadcasting & Cable. 

Update 13 Mar. 2007:
The NTIA links above don't work, but won't be able to troubleshoot until tonight.  In the meantime, they were yesterday on the front page at http://www.ntia.doc.gov/. 

Update 14 Mar. 2007:
The NTIA links have been fixed.  --Dennis

Rosenblum keynote at Public Media 2007

Michael Rosenblum's terrific keynote, "The Ice Business and the Age of the VJ," (see notes here, here and here) at the Public Media 2007 conference is now available in audio and video versions at IntegratedMedia.org.  --Dennis

Calling the Question

If you read my long post of Sunday, Public media content online, calling the question, or if you didn't (he summarizes it better than I did), be sure to read Stephen Hill's review of it at Spatial Relations.  I'll respond over the weekend early in the week after I have a chance to read the Wick Rowland piece to which Stephen refers. --Dennis

MovieBeam Sold for Pennies on the Dollar

MovieBeam has been using spare data capacity from public television analog channels to transmit on-demand movies to set-top boxes.  Liz Gannes writes:

Well that didn’t work. On-demand movie company MovieBeam, a much-toiled-over Disney spinoff, has been bought by Movie Gallery for less than $10 million. With burnout speed of bubble proportions, MovieBeam had just one year ago relaunched with $48.5 million in recapitalization from major backers after a reported $70 million spent on the project at Disney. ...

Link:  NewTeeVee.

Peer to Peer Power

Ben Hess has an interesting list -- though not comprehensive -- of peer-to-peer content delivery networks.  Link:  The Hess Report. 

Jackson West has more:

Zattoo, dually based in Zurich and Ann Arbor, sounds a bit like P2P TV efforts we’ve recently reviewed such as UUSee and MediaZone.  ¶  And of course, there are the inevitable comparisons to fellow European contenders Joost and Babelgum. In Zattoo’s case, the core difference is that programs are not time-shifted, but shown linearly in the same way they are on TV, currently including the existing interstitial ads.  ¶  Zattoo, which is based on research done at the University of Michigan, doesn’t currently have any channels available outside of Switzerland, somewhat hindering our review. However, initial testers such as blogger Bruno Giussani say they’re impressed.

Zattoo Cooking Up More P2P TV.  Link:  NewTeeVee.  --Dennis

Google, Intel, Skype and Yahoo! Seek Rules for Bidding on Broadcast Frequencies

Drew Clark writes:

The country's two satellite television companies have joined forces with four major technology companies and a wireless company to promote the auction of frequencies currently used by television broadcasters.  ¶  In a March 5 meeting at the Federal Communications Commission with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, the tech companies – Google, Intel, Skype and Yahoo! – joined with Access Spectrum to promote their "Coalition for 4G in America."  ¶  The engagement of Internet giants like Google and Yahoo!, which traditionally have not lobbied the FCC, suggests considerable interest by the technology industry in the upcoming auction, which is set to begin no later than January 28, 2008. In 2006, Congress fixed February 19, 2009, as the end-date for analog television, freeing a wide swath of radio-frequencies for use by new technologies. ...

Link:  DrewClark.com.

Ethernet: How high can it go?

Sandra Gittlen writes (22 Nov. 2006) about an IEEE study group that's been formed to develop standards that will take Ethernet beyond its current upper limit of 10 billion bits per second (10 Gigabits):

... "Traffic is doubling every 12 to 14 months. If the industry can't come up with a solution soon, we'll become bandwidth constrained," says Lane Patterson, CTO of Equinix, an Internet exchange carrier in Foster City, Calif.  ¶  At the YouTube Web site, traffic at peak times is hitting 25Gbps and is expected to climb to 75Gbps soon. "User traffic to our site is continuing to grow. We add multiple 10-gig circuits a month to meet this growth," says Colin Corbett, director of networking. ...

... "There is a dynamic happening in the marketplace, where there is a shift in how video is used and consumed by customers," says Suraj Shetty, director of Cisco's Service Provider Routing Technology Group.  ¶  Shetty points to new services -- business- and consumer-oriented -- that enable real-time global viewership. It's this move to mass consumption of video that is straining worldwide resources and sparking the need to move beyond 10G Ethernet, he says. ...

Link:  Network World.

Also see a later (22 Jan. 2007) interview by Gittlen with John D'Ambrosia, who is chairman of that study group.  On the Horizon: 100 Gigabit Ethernet.  Link:  Network World.  --Dennis

 

Can Video Help Save the Satellite Radio Business?

Ian Austen writes:

... Although XM and Sirius offer radio, in theory, the systems could be adapted to distribute any kind of data. And, indeed, both companies have made limited steps in that direction. Subscribers can already choose to have selected stock quotes, as well as news and sports headlines, beamed to the tiny screens on their receivers.  ¶  Both companies beam weather data to aviators and boaters through services that cost upwards of $50 a month. Later this year, XM will extend that by beaming weather information to a hand-held unit for hikers and hunters.  ¶  But Sirius has also made tentative steps toward offering video. At trade shows, Sirius has displayed prototype systems for sending video to back-seat displays like those now used by in-car DVD players. And the company recently, if vaguely, outlined plans to deliver some form of video programming aimed at children later this year. ...

Link:  New York Times.