[Grovenet] New Broadcast TV (WAS: Get cher coupons here!! Big black market suretodevelope!! Act now!!)

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

A lot of people don't realize the USA has the most antiquated television
broadcasting system standards in the world for two reasons:

1) The USA was the first to implement technical standards for TV
broadcasting. That was in the 1930's!

2) In establishing the TV standards they faced same issue we do with the
internet today: bandwidth. Speed wasn't a variable if one wanted motion
pictures that didn't jerk, so the tradeoff was between image quality and
bandwidth. The FCC did a lot of looking around and, since television was to
be a home entertainment medium, they asked "What sort of pictures will
people accept in their homes?" In the 1930's the latest and greatest
technology for "home entertainment" was 8-mm "home movies". They were black
and white movies on tiny 8-mm wide film (1/2 the width used by most
industrial/military films and 1/4 the size of film used in theatres). The
smaller film was cheaper, but the small size meant grainer, fuzzier
pictures. Still people who could afford it flocked to use the technology. So
the TV standards were designed to produce pictures that would approximate
the quality of 8-mm home movies. 

It's amazing what the engineers managed to cram into the same television
signal spectrum bandwidth over the years since: color imaging, subtitles,
stereo sound, timing signals, etc. All through the years the FCC has
insisted that the TV broadcast bandwidth remain the same using the same
frequency (channel) assignments and that the video and audio signal formats
be "backwardly compatible" so that a set made in 1945 could receive a TV
signal transmitted today. The only real change was to drop Channel 1 shortly
after WWII for a variety of technical reasons the prewar engineers hadn't
anticipated.  

In the subsequent years big problem was to add color. That did result in a
poorer quality signal, but a color one. Engineers noted that we humans have
terrible visual acuity in the red end of the spectrum. If we go into a room
illuminated by red light, everything looks rather soft and indistinct. By
contrast, blue light brings out detail and sharpness in what our eyes see.
So the engineers first reduced the overall picture "sharpness" to save a bit
of bandwidth, making the pictures fuzzier than they were previously in black
and white, then they used the bandwidth saved to integrate a color image
carefully shaped to match our eyesight. The red parts of your TV image are
very poor quality, lacking almost all detail, since your eyes can't see any
better in red anyway. Other colors had detail to match eyesight fairly well
too. 

The end result was that a color TV picture could be watched in black and
white on an old set, but it looked less sharp than before. That didn't
matter, people were ecstatic over color images and when some people
complained that their black and white TV pictures weren't as sharp as before
they were told to buy a color set. The brilliant NBC Peacock of the 1960's
was here to stay. 

Other countries, such as England, Europe and South America standardized
their TV systems  after we did, building on things we discovered were
less-than-ideal. From the outset they adopted a standard for sharper images
and then they adopted a different color system that wasn't exactly backward
compatible but which produced superior color fidelity to ours. European TV
using SECAM or PAL color systems have consistently make American TV look
obviously soft and fuzzy. Blowing up our fuzzy pictures on bigger screens
when the projection TV craze hit didn't help. Clearly American TV was
bad-looking TV. 

Finally, 70 years after the US technical standards for broadcast TV were
adopted, they are for the first time being updated.

I wonder how long the new standards will last? 

Ron D'Eau Claire  



-----Original Message-----

Actually, TV could use a boost of technology and there isn't much room at
the current location. In fact ch 2-6 are one spectrum, 7-13 another and
14-69 a whole nother one. This has been in the works for over a decade and
has actually been postponed a few years already. But there is a giveaway.
Low Power TV. This is kind of a mop & pop TV broadcasting. The government
has set aside $65M to assist these little stations to move to the digital
world. I can see this getting some folks to buy existing LPTV setups just so
they can get in on this cow.
  -----Original Message-----