The Digital Television Revolution

Origins to Outcomes

M. Starks

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137273345
• eBook ISBN: 9781137273352
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Film e video

This account of the global switch to digital television, from its origins to its emerging outcomes, provides an understanding of how digital television is converging with the Internet. It pictures a future in which the democratic role of the media, freedom of expression and democratic participation can be enhanced.

Part I

Birth and Development

1

The Impetus for Digital Television

Summary of the chapter’s argument

While digital television was invented by Research and Development (R&D) experts, it was adopted for a combination of industrial policy and broadcaster interest reasons in the United States and Europe. An underlying aim was to prevent Japan from achieving a global technical standard for analogue HDTV. Governments perceived the possibility of securing benefits from spectrum release if ever analogue terrestrial television could be closed down but no one initially knew whether this would be possible. It could only become feasible if digital TV reception, on any or all platforms, reached ‘take-off’ point, but, neither for spectrum release motives nor as part of a wider ‘Information Society’ policy, were governments prepared to subsidise the costs of the start-up stage. TV set manufacturers were also cautious. Swift take-up was, however, achieved by private sector operators, mainly in the digital satellite sphere, shouldering the risk of subsidising set-top boxes in order to build a pay-TV business. This stage of digital TV development could deliver take-up in the market but a compulsory switch-off of analogue terrestrial could not be based on a foundation of voluntary consumer subscription.

Origins

Digital television was certainly not invented by broadcast engineers in order to surrender broadcasting frequencies to telecommunications companies. The technical invention, described in depth by Martin Bell (Bell, 2007), was the product of various building blocks – digital coding (already in use in the recorded music industry), digital compression (overseen by the Motion Picture Expert Group, MPEG) and then systems of digital transmission related to the satellite, cable and terrestrial platforms. Broadcast engineers work continuously on ways of improving picture and sound quality, minimising interference and enhancing television and radio capabilities and features. If an innovation promises to have sufficient consumer appeal to support a market, as in the case of colour television and stereo radio (but not quadraphonic radio), the broadcasting and receiver industries adopt it. However, the context for the invention of digital terrestrial television was set by a wider set of commercial and political pressures.

The story can best begin with Japan’s desire in the 1980s to develop a new generation of analogue television technology in the form of HDTV. Working with the Japanese receiver industry, whose giant companies were so powerful internationally, the national public service broadcaster NHK developed a studio production system called Hi-Vision, based on 1125 lines of picture (compared with the 525 in use in the United States and the 625 in the UK) and coupled it with a transmission system called MUSE for satellite transmission and reception (Bell, 2007). Far ahead of any rival R&D work elsewhere, Japanese analogue HDTV was ready for submission to the body which approves international technical standards in this field, the CCIR (Comité consultatif international pour la radio), at a meeting in Dubrovnik in 1986. The Japanese proposal was that their system should become a world standard.

Technical standards in broadcasting are in effect internationally agreed blueprints for making equipment which is standardised in order to provide interoperability with other related production, transmission and reception equipment (Wood, 2011). They play a vital commercial role in facilitating the creation of markets which are large enough to support major investment in innovation and, generally, they are a friend to consumers: they help ensure that, if you buy a Sony television, for example, it will receive the transmissions of all the terrestrial broadcasters and if you couple it to a Panasonic video-recorder the equipment will all work smoothly.

However, technical standards also play a role in protecting markets: by adopting a set of standards for a particular territory which are different from those accepted elsewhere, domestic manufacturers can try to limit foreign competition. Moreover, foreign manufacturers entering the market, or foreign countries adopting the same standards, then pay royalties to the companies which designed the standards. In analogue television, North America had a system called NTSC (National Television System Committee) while Europe mostly used PAL (Phase Alternating Line) and France used its own SECAM (Séquentiel couleur à mémoire). So the Japanese proposal to make their HDTV system a world standard was a bold jump.

The United States was initially supportive of the Japanese proposal: after all, the Americans made TV shows and movies which they wished to sell all over the world, so the concept of a global market, in which, for example, video-recorders in every country would work with American tapes, had a certain appeal (Brinkley, 1997). The Europeans, however, objected strongly, from motives of cultural protectionism in France’s case and, more broadly, of industrial protectionism in the interests of European consumer electronics companies like Philips and Thomson. Europe therefore set about creating an analogue HDTV satellite system of its own.

The United States: ATSC digital television

Back in America, which only had one remaining major electronics manufacturer at the time (Galperin, 2004), a different debate was taking place. The American analogue terrestrial broadcasters were trying to defend their occupation of such a large block of spectrum against pressures from the land mobile industry, championed by Motorola, who wanted to have some of the broadcast spectrum released for use by two-way radios operated by the police, ambulance services and commercial delivery companies (Brinkley, 1997; Galperin, 2004). To the broadcasters’ industry body, the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters), HDTV sounded a great idea. Terrestrial HDTV would require the use of the entire under-utilised spectrum at issue with the land mobile lobbyists. So the Americans invited the Japanese to give a demonstration of their Hi-Vision MUSE system in Washington. The result was dramatic in two respects. First, the improvement in picture quality was stunning and HDTV was recognised as the next big development for American television. Second, both American commercial interests and American politicians were outraged at the idea that this business should simply be handed to the Japanese. As Hernan Galperin put it, the Japanese attempt to gain worldwide adoption of the NHK system ‘set off an international arms race to develop HDTV’ (Galperin, 2004: 35).

In 1987 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set up an Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS), chaired by former FCC Chairman Richard E. Wiley, with membership overlapping substantially with the broadcasting technical standards coordinating body, the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC). Its task was to advise the FCC on the technical and policy issues surrounding HDTV. Wiley’s committee reviewed the current state of R&D work and announced that it would hold a contest on an open international basis. NHK would be able to submit their entry. As one industry chronicler excitedly noted:

Nothing like this had ever happened before. Wiley’s rules had set off a grand, international competition, sanctioned by the United States government! Anyone in the world could enter. The contestants would be tested and graded. Finally Wiley and his committee would choose a winner, who would hold licensing rights for the next generation of television. Everyone who built and sold HDTVs in America would pay this winner royalties, which would be worth millions, billions!

(Brinkley, 1997: 44)

A key contender was General Instrument who, in 1990, dropped a bombshell on the industry by announcing that it had designed an all-digital HDTV system for terrestrial television. Within a few months, three rival all-digital systems were also put forward. Japan’s bid for world standard status for its analogue system was doomed.

The FCC Advisory Committee rallied behind the all-digital concept and the proponents of the rival digital HDTV systems formed what they called the Grand Alliance. They set out to design the best combination. As the different components emerged from their tests, the ATSC documented the specifications for what was to become known as the ATSC Digital Television Standard for terrestrial television. The picture format would be widescreen. Following pressure from the computer industry, the question of whether the picture should be based on the traditional broadcasting interlaced scanning system or on the computer industry’s progressive scanning technique was left open. Broadcasters would be free to choose and TV sets would need to be able to handle both. Technical specifications were set for standard definition digital television as well as for HDTV. In 1995, when testing procedures were complete, the Advisory Committee recommended adoption of the ATSC standard and the FCC formally adopted it the following year.

In parallel the FCC had done some preliminary thinking on how HDTV, once standardised, could come into operation in practice. Its starting position, formulated in 1991, was that the incumbent terrestrial broadcasters should each be allocated an extra frequency channel on which to launch digital services. There was no policy move to introduce new broadcasting competitors but, while the terrestrial broadcasters had viewed HDTV as a way of clinging on to their spectrum, the FCC now had other ideas: after a transition period, the analogue frequencies would be withdrawn. Thus the seeds of the regulatory strategy of launching digital terrestrial television with the aim of reclaiming spectrum after a transition period were planted early on – though the next FCC Chairman, Reed Hundt, believed that he had inherited a ‘crazy policy’:

I never met anyone who truly believed that the broadcasters would give back the analog channels. In the foreseeable future, Americans were not about to throw away their 200 million analog televisions, so broadcasters would not stop sending signals to them.

(Hundt, 2000: 65)

Europe: DVB digital television

Meanwhile in Europe the major consumer electronics manufacturers and the major national broadcasters had set off down a separate road. They were as keen to be different from the United States as they were from Japan and committed to developing distinctive European standards to protect their European market. The birth of analogue satellite broadcasting in the 1980s had given them the opportunity to revisit the established PAL and SECAM standards and to design a new analogue system around which Europe could unite. They focussed on satellite transmission. The use of medium-powered communications satellites was well-established but, following the World Administrative Radio Conference of 1977, nations were allocated frequencies for the new satellite technology of high-powered direct broadcasting to the home (DBS). Urged on by the European Commission and the European Broadcasting Union, the engineering experts set about designing a new analogue transmission standard on which Europe’s DBS services should be based (Bell, 2007).

The MAC (Multiplexed Analogue Component) transmission system was initially designed by engineering experts at the UK’s Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) and backed, despite some BBC engineering misgivings, by a UK government committee chaired by Sir Anthony Part. Following collaborative work in Europe a group of MAC standards was elaborated and in 1986 a European Community directive mandated the use of the MAC technology for TV services from high-powered satellites.

The European response to Japan’s bid to turn its Hi-Vision and MUSE system into a world standard for HDTV was to design a variant of MAC termed HD-MAC. Europe, however, was not convinced at that time that HDTV was ripe for commercial introduction. The technology was too new for receivers to be feasible other than at very high cost. Moreover, to Europeans the attraction of DBS seemed to lie, rather, in its ability to provide many more channels at standard definition. Two factors help explain the contrast with the American perspective.

First, growth in the European television industry had been much more restricted than in the United States. The leading role had been allocated to publicly funded, state-established national broadcasters expected to deliver a service to the whole country and frequencies had been allocated to maximise national coverage. As in the UK, some commercial television had then been introduced as well but European analogue terrestrial viewers typically had far fewer channels to choose from than viewers in the United States. So Europe had an element of pent-up demand for the vista of multi-channel television which satellite, and indeed cable, broadcasting could deliver.

Second, the European analogue television picture quality, based on PAL or SECAM, was better, having been designed later, than the American NTSC system – whose variability European engineers were prone to denigrate as ‘Never The Same Colour’ (Bell, 2007: 11). American viewers therefore had a stronger interest in the improved technical quality offered by HDTV.

While Europe’s HD-MAC system never really became operational, the use of MAC for standard definition satellite broadcasting did become established. For the UK it proved a commercial disaster and its failure more broadly led directly to Europe’s conversion to digital television.

The UK had been allocated spectrum for five channels of direct-to-home analogue satellite broadcasting. Two were awarded by the government to the BBC in 1982 for new BBC satellite channels to be launched on a British-made satellite, with no government funding. The scheme collapsed: the receiver industry would not manufacture receivers without prior broadcaster investment, the BBC would not take commercial risks with licence fee investment and the government would not underwrite the venture. An attempt then to construct a broader coalition, including ITV and others, known as ‘The Club of 21’, also foundered. So the commercial broadcasting regulator, the IBA, advertised a UK satellite franchise and awarded it to a new commercial consortium, called British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB). BSB would use a high-powered satellite capable of being received on a small square aerial – the ‘squarial’, as it was known – and would comply with the new MAC technical standard required by the IBA and the European directive. Its services would be marketed on a subscription basis. BSB aimed to launch in 1989 and expected to have a monopoly of the brand-new UK satellite TV market (Starks, 2007).

However, in 1988 the press mogul, Rupert Murdoch, announced that Sky Television, then operating a small operation in Europe using PAL technology on a medium-powered communications satellite, would launch a rival direct-to-home service for the UK. It would use a Luxembourg-based Astra satellite outside the IBA’s licensing remit. Since the satellite was medium-powered, it fell outside the scope of the European MAC directive (Hart, 2004), so Sky chose to stick with the well-tried PAL standard. Sky was first-to-market in 1989, with four channels. Its services were initially free, relying on advertising, with subscription to follow later. A bidding war began with BSB for Hollywood film rights, and, given its start-up investment and no subscription revenue, Sky went deep into the red.

Meanwhile, BSB, already spending on a much greater scale, discovered that the MAC receiver microchip, technically the key to reception, was still in development – no working version existed, or could exist in time for a 1989 launch. The ‘squarials’ also had technical teething problems. So BSB did not launch until 1990. Arriving second as a more expensive buy, BSB then subsidised consumer take-up and its losses in 1990 ran to about £8 million a week (Chippindale and Franks, 1991). This was unsustainable. Without telling either its chief executive or the IBA, the BSB Board agreed merger terms with Sky which were tantamount to a Sky take-over. The new company, BSkyB, would be headed by Sky TV’s Sam Chisholm and would use the Astra satellite and PAL technology. The BSB satellite with its MAC technology became redundant.

BSB’s collapse has been termed ‘one of the greatest commercial disasters in British history and certainly the greatest in the history of the British media’ (Chippindale and Franks, 1991: xi). The damage was not confined to the UK: European manufacturers had invested heavily in producing MAC receivers. Elsewhere in Europe analogue satellite services began to use PAL. Some MAC services continued in Germany and Scandinavia for a short time but, with the Americans now working on a potential digital system, Europe’s bid to create its own new analogue standard reached a dead-end.

The way forward emerged from a secret meeting of seven friends in a German castle in 1991. They came from the German public broadcasting organisations ARD and ZDF, from key receiver manufacturers Grundig, Nokia, Philips and Thomson and from the silicon chip maker Intermetall (Bell, 2007). They wanted to ignore the European Commission’s directive on MAC and start afresh down the digital road – and they thought that technical standards should be framed less by technical regulators and politicians and more by the commercial realities of the market. Thus began a process which led to the creation of the European Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Project in 1993. Under wise leadership, the DVB established the principle that design work undertaken by a technical module of experts would be governed by requirements set by a commercial module of potential investors. The organisation expanded as an alliance based on a memorandum of understanding and swiftly began to produce results.

For Germany and France, who had not botched their satellite policy in the way the UK had, the priority was the development of a digital satellite standard (DVB-S). This was achieved in 1993. The following year the DVB digital cable standard (DVB-C) was finalised. The third member of the family was to be the digital terrestrial standard, work on which was more complex. It involved a transmission technology called COFDM (Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing), derived from work done on digital radio in another European project, which was different from the VSB (Vestigial Sideband) system adopted in the United States (Hart, 2004). The DVB-T standard for digital terrestrial television was finally approved in early 1996. The Europeans, of course, believed their digital terrestrial technology to be technically superior to the Americans’ but failed to convince the United States to change from its ATSC standard.

Broadcaster push in the UK

In the UK BSkyB was emerging as a powerful competitor to the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 (the UK’s last analogue channel, Five, was to start with restricted coverage in 1997). Now that it had a monopoly in satellite pay-TV and was the principal supplier of premium services to the UK’s cable operators, it was building a successful business, notably at the tabloid end of the market, with an appeal based mainly on sport and movies but a commitment to serious news too. In 1992 it laid the foundations for a prosperous future by buying the rights to live coverage of Premier League football. By the mid-1990s BSkyB had the financial strength and business acumen to do a lot more competitive damage to the UK’s major terrestrial broadcasters, who viewed it with a mixture of fear and awe.

Digital satellite technology was mature and tested in the market now: Direct TV’s digital satellite pay-TV service in the United States was thriving and using its huge capacity to provide a Near-Video-On-Demand service, based on staggered starts to movies. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 saw with alarm that BSkyB could probably launch a digital satellite service for the UK at an early date. In analogue, satellite Sky had already shown the advantage of being first-to-market and had humiliated the British broadcasting ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Birth and Development
• Part II: Shaping the Outcomes
• In Conclusion
• References
• Index