Reality Has Never Been So Real
by
Ross M. Miller
Miller Risk Advisors
www.millerrisk.com
January 23, 2006
It is now official that, barring further Congressional
action, analog television is scheduled to vanish right after the 2009
Super Bowl. As I wrote last year, this is not such a bad thing except for
Congress wasting vast quantities of money on subsidized converters boxes.
For the past month, I have sampled HDTV as it is
currently offered by my local cable company. Given the increasingly
popularity of this site, I will be intentionally vague about many details
so that a popular search engine does not turn this site into the place
where people with questions about their sets come to look for information.
This site is already getting crowded with folks looking for reviews of
outlet malls.
I first saw HDTV in a retail electronics store in
Southern California just after its initial roll out (LA was among the
first markets to get it) and was wowed by it. I knew that there was no
point getting a set because it would be years until it came to upstate New
York. I never did actually get a "set," but the big LCD monitor
that I purchased to scroll around giant databases conveniently comes with
a DVI/HDCP input that connects to an HDTV cable box no more complex than
my old digital cable box. I was going to wait until I got all of my
important business out of the way during the holiday break before going to
the cable company's storefront and obtain a new cable box until I found
out that the HDTV boxes disappeared almost as fast as XBOX 360 consoles. I
also figured out that it is unlikely that I will ever get caught up.
There are two wonderful things about HDTV. First, it
makes traditional TV look so bad that I have stopped watching old TV
entirely. I still have CNBC on my "favorites," but it looks
plain awful—partly because it is (who let Jim Cramer take over the
station?) and partly because my "monitor" does not have the
circuitry necessary to "optimize" non-HDTV content. As a result,
the time I spend watching TV has plummeted from minimal to negligible. (I
do listen to the canned, surprisingly high quality, classical music on my
cable system almost constantly, but without any picture.) Second,
special-purpose HDTV stations carry a variety of "eye candy"
programming that would never show up on TV otherwise. Most of it requires
a pre-comatose state of mind—one I had better be a few decades away from
achieving—to appreciate fully. Some of it is borderline amusing. Given
my blazingly short attention span, this programming does not take up much
time. I can now go through life knowing that I watched thirty seconds each
of sumo wrestling, rugby, and some weird form of boxing that is done in
cages. There are all sort of concerts in HDTV, too, some of which have
hooked me for close to five minutes. I never knew that The Pixies got back
together and they seem less edgy out of context. Perhaps Black Francis can
come and give a guest lecture in one of my finance classes. (Yes, this is
the commentary that will appear during the first three weeks of classes
during the Spring 2006 semester, so maybe I can scare off some students,
assuming they find this site.)
I just have the barebones HDTV package, so I don't get
those cable channels that provide other types of "nature
programming" that may well look worse in higher resolution. As it is,
I once tuned by Roy Firestone interviewing someone on an unusually vivid
high-definition show (I suspect that it was shot in digital video at the
native resolution of my monitor and that my cable company forgot to
compress it) and I am now convinced that there are some things that look
better in low-def.
Apparently, many buyers of HDTV-ready sets have no
problem with low-def programming. In any reasonably sophisticated home
theatre set-up there are literally thousands of ways to get a monitor, A/V
receiver, and cable box to talk to each other and many of them do not
yield a high-def picture by anyone's standards. Non-technically inclined
individuals, including a good chunk of technicians working for cable
companies, are likely to be happily watching their sets in one of these
low-def configurations.
Anyway, I am writing about HDTV because it is clearly an
important driver of technology and that sort of thing matters for the
economy. In the old days, the FCC would have simply decreed how the new
kind of TV would work, but in post-Reagan times the market (with the help
of Congress) gets to decide what happens. There is no telling what will
happen. I am not complaining, but one result of this is massive interim
confusion.
Much of the confusion comes from there being two
existing flavors of HDTV (720p and 1080i) and an emerging one (1080p) that
could win eventually even though no real content is currently available
for it. There are also various flavors of enhanced TV, including the 480p
format that most DVDs and DVD players can produce. (Old analog TV is a
lousy form of 480i, and you can find out what all these numbers and
letters mean from some other site if you do not already know.) There are
many competing display technologies and, depending on their native
resolutions, some displays can do some types of HDTV better than others.
The dirty secret about HDTV is that the signals
currently being broadcast are sufficiently compressed that the picture
that people with even the best sets are currently receiving (good as they
are) fall far short from what HDTV is capable of. The problem is the
bandwidth that full-fledged HDTV requires. There is also an abundance of
low-def programming on high-def stations. Those stations are easily
identified because they do not have a lot of penguins, polar bears, and
sumo wrestlers wandering about on them.
Immediately after Christmas, my cable Internet
connection started to act up and would become unusable during evenings and
weekends. My cable company refused to discuss what was going on with me,
but I noticed that three "scheduled maintenance events" appeared
on their system status page. After the events my Internet service as
almost back to normal; however, compression artifacts were more frequent
on my HDTV channels. (The most typical compression artifact is an
unnatural "blockiness" to the picture.) My guess is that all the
new HDTVs (including mine) had overloaded the system and that the cable
company's solution was not so much to add more capacity, but to degrade
the cable signal further.
While the optimal configuration of networks for the
transmission of high-bandwidth signals is a problem that me and my techie
friends can solve in our sleep, it does seem to challenge my local cable
company. The real question is does it challenge Cisco, who not only makes
network routing equipment, but also most of the cable converter boxes as
the result of a recent acquisition. Indeed, HDTV presents a golden
opportunity for both Cisco and the cable companies (and maybe even the
phone companies). Getting a full 1080p signal over the airwaves to a TV
set is not something that (as I understand it) is possible with the
bandwidth that the FCC has allocated to the new digital TV stations that
are displacing the old analog ones. With fiber optic cable and a
reasonable routing algorithm, mind-blowing video can be piped into every
home worth running cable out to.
And now here's some bad news for Hollywood and anyone
hoping to pipe really nice TV pictures to people. If you took most normal
people and showed that a DVD (converted from film) on a big-screen TV,
they would think that it was true high-def. There is no question that 720p
and 1080i content on cable look better than a 480p DVD, but not vastly
better. As it is, there are two competing formats for the next generation
of high-def videodiscs, but if the typical consumer cannot really tell
them apart from a standard DVD, the rate of adoption could be even slower
than expected.
Copyright 2006 by Miller Risk Advisors. Permission
granted to forward by electronic means and to excerpt or broadcast 250
words or less provided a citation is made to www.millerrisk.com.