2.Brief History of HDTV

2.1 Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS)

Because of political and commercial pressure, the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS) was formed in 1987 with Dick Wiley appointed chairman. As Wiley stated, the ACATS objective was “to look into the political, economical, and spectrum trade-offs involved in establishing a new transmission standard.”

2.2 Grand Alliance

In the late 1980’s, the US TV industry was composed of several different groups with varying interests and goals. On one side were the broadcasters who pursued HDTV as a means of keeping the unused channels Land Mobile threatened to take away. One the other side is the manufactures, which were in poor shape, consistently losing their market share to Japan. The once proud American television industry was reduced to RCA and Zenith. Though their interest in achieving an HDTV system stemmed from different reasons, these manufactures would be part of the core of competing HDTV proposals.

At May 24, 1993, GI, Zenith, AT&T, MIT, Sarnoff, Philips, and Thomson formed the HDTV Grand Alliance. The principal task of this organization was to design the specification of the GA HDTV system, and supervised the build-up process of the actual machine.

The Grand Alliance was more than a standard-making commercial consortium. Indeed, the eventual goal of this organization was to propose a universal HDTV standard for the United States. But the immediate task was to build an actual machine. It was on the basis of the specifications of this actual machine that the HDTV standard was established. In order to accomplish this task, the Grand Alliance was established as a ‘virtual company’.

To our knowledge, the two most important technical decisions made in the Grand Alliance—the adoption of Dolby AC-3 audio system, and the choice of Zenith VSB transmission technology-- were both made in a four-vote basis.

Figure 2.1 The Grand Alliance organization (courtesy to Dr. Glenn Reitmeier, Sarnoff corporation).

2.3 Implementation of the System

For the build-up of the actual system, the manner of responsibility division was different. The implementation tasks were divided by subsystems. Different companies were responsible for different specific subsystems. They were no longer mixed together to work on the same technologies.

Thank to the layered architecture that all the proponents decided to adopt, the labor division among companies can be drawn:

•AT&T was responsible for the video encoder at the system level

•GI for the video encoder at the board level

•Philips for the video decoder, Sarnoff for the transport encoder

•Thomson for the transport decoder, and Zenith for the transmission system

•The audio compression was contracted to a non-GA company—Dolby

•The whole system was integrated by Sarnoff

Figure 2.1 shows the layered architecture of the GA system andthe corresponding companies responsible for the implementation of these layers.

Figure 2.2 Technology-based labor division of the Grand Alliance

 

In 1996, FCC proclaimed the HDTV standard, which was almost identical to the GA specification submitted by ACATS in late 1995.

 

2.4 HDTV Timeline


1968: Japan NHK initiates a project to develop a new standard in television.

1970-1980: An HDTV prototype is developed in Japan called the MUSE system.

Early 1980s: Movie producers are offered a high-definition television system developed by Sony and the NHK. This high-definition system allowed producers to record, play and edit immediately and then transfer to film so that production time was considerably shortened.

1987: The NHK is invited by the National Association of Broadcasters in the United States to present their MUSE system to the Federal Communications Commission.

1990: General Instrument Corp. submits the first proposal for a completely digital HDTV system.

1993: The Grand Alliance is formed combining together the four separate American teams that had been working independently on the development of HDTV.

1993: Broadcasters speak out in opposition of HDTV saying that it would cost far too much and limit broadcasting opportunities.

1994: Rupert Murdoch also speaks out against HDTV saying that unused channels should be utilized to develop new stations, not to support the HDTV system.

1995: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission officially sets the standard for completely digital HDTV.

1998: HDTV products become available to consumers.

1999: FCC mandates that the top 10 markets start offering Digital TV broadcasts by May 1st of 1999.

2006: According to the FCC mandate, all stations are to be capable of broadcasting HDTV by the year 2006. At this time conventional broadcasting will be almost completely phased out.