I am quite relieved that high definition television (HDTV) seems to be eclipsing the i-TV buzz that has dominated a lot of industry conferences and trade press over recent years. It's refreshing because unlike i-TV which has fueled countless debates, white papers and key note speaches but failed to deliver much value to viewers or broadcasters in most cases, it is a very simple proposition: Higher resolution video and audio.

A technological advancement has arrived that might genuinly benefit the consumer through enriching their TV experience. Rather than muddying the water with mindbending concepts such as pressing red and leaving the broadcast stream, it's simple TV as we know and love it - just a bit better. In fact it's not that much of an advancements really if you consider the constituent components that make HDTV possible: Better video and audio compression coupled with the correct hardware to encode and decode and higher res. screens. (The codecs used to support HDTV have been used on other platforms for years). It's more of a logical improvement - and about time.

Why have we not seen this transition sooner? The problem for many digital broadcasters has been that they and their viewers have been locked into infrastructures that only supports the less efficient and older MPEG-2 video and audio standards. Such hardware has been expensive and consumers have needed a good reason to purchase a new TV and STB. However, a concerted effort from the consumer electronics and broadcast industries combined with more attractive pricing is starting to tempt viewers to upgrade their kit.

There is nothing wrong with the older MPEG-2 based technologies apart from their age - they have on the whole served their purposes well since their adoption in the early '90s. But lets face it, when considering the accelaration in media technologies, they're pretty old and even though they have been consistently improved they are now at the limits of their capabilities. The newer codecs such as MPEG-4 offer more efficient bandwidth use and hence more favourable economics for HDTV broadcasters.

In the 1950s, people were happy with black and white TV - they knew nothing better and it was enormously succesful. But when colour arrived, b+w didn't quite do it any more. It will be the same with HDTV. People will expect HDTV and it will be the common resolution for digital TV delivery - a must have rather than a nice to have.

I can appreciate why broadcasters around Europe, including more recently Sky, are aggresively pushing HDTV packages and the required hardware to enable these services, but in terms of competing with so called Internet TV services, the competitive advantage may be short lived. Let's not forget that Internet or web based video and TV services already offer such codec technologies and PC users are used to high resolution monitors and state of the art hardware. With the acceleration of high bandwidth networks to the home, HDTV will seem like more of a keep up effort than a leap in front of the other Internet based delivery platforms. Indeed the concept of HDTV will not be confined to satellite, cable and the set top box but will be universally available across all media delivery platforms that offer large screen video consumption.

In summary I think that HDTV is a necessary step for broadcasters and platform operators to ensure their broadcast services remain compelling. However a far more important long term goal for broadcasters is the exploitation of new and emerging platforms such as IPTV, VOD and the Internet as a whole.
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http://dishtv.blogware.com/blog
Originally Posted on 24/02/2006 15:11:30
Content source: http://nativ.tv/futurevideo/HDTV/?permalink=The-Emergence-of-HDTV.html