HDTV Almanac

If you’re a frequent reader of HDTV Almanac, you probably know that I’m a big proponent of the concept of “command and control” for video entertainment and information. By this I mean that you can watch what you want, when you want, and where you want. I believe that is the driving force behind change and new technology in video.

A new study by the market research firm iSupply lends some strong support to my position. The video-on-demand — VoD — market grew 40% from 2004 to 2005. They expect the VoD market to grow from $2 billion this year to $13 billion in 2010. They expect that there will be almost 150 million VoD users/subscribers worldwide by 2010.

They cite global IPTV as an enabling development, along with high-def DVD recorders that allow download and burn of movie content. Movies are available on-demand and for download closer to the theater release date; sometimes even the same day. Mobile video is growing rapidly. iSupply points out that there could be some losers in this change; demand for DVD rentals could be shifted to VoD services.

More than ever, it looks to me as though people want more control over their video viewing, and that this will drive massive changes over the next ten years. The old broadcast model of content distribution — watch what we’re offering when we make it available on our schedule — is under siege. As TiVo and other digital video recorders take hold, and online services offer more and more content for download at low or no cost, viewing habits are going to change radically. The question will no longer be “what’s on television tonight?”, but instead will be “what do you want to watch now?”

According to a story on chinapost.com.tw, the German consumer magazine Test advises that you should sit no closer to an HDTV than three times the screen’s diagonal measurement. So for a 32″ model, you should sit at least 96″ away, which is eight feet.

Now, I’ll admit that this is a second-hand reference, but the facts are so simple that it’s difficult to think that the reporter misquoted it. And it’s wrong.

First, it’s wrong because it treats 720p and 1080p displays the same, which is not the case at all. The pixel size of a 32″ 1080p screen is one-third smaller than that of a 32″ 720p screen. So you are more likely to see the dots of a 720p than a 108p screen at a given distance.

But the bigger question is how close do you have to be to see the individual dots at all? As a rule of thumb, a person with average eyesight can see details as small as 1/60th of a degree of their field of vision. In order to see the dots, they must be at least big enough to fit 1,800 of them in 30 degrees of your field of vision. So to see the 1,280 horizontal dots of a 720p display, you need it to fill at at least 21 degrees of your field of vision. For the 1,920 horizontal dots of a 1080p display, it must fill 32 degrees. Do the math, and you’ll find that you must be sitting much, much closer than eight feet for a 32″ screen before you’ll be able to see the dots.

For a 32″ screen, this works out to six feet for a 720p screen, and just four feet for a 1080p screen. If you watch a 32″ 1080p screen from eight feet away, you won’t be able to tell the difference between it and a 720p screen, and you’re wasting the money you spent for the extra resolution. It is important that you get a set big enough for you to see the HDTV detail from the normal viewing distance in your room.

One simple calculation can tell you what size HDTV to get, depending on which resolution you choose. You can find it in Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV.

OLEDs are one of the most promising novel display technologies, especially for HDTVs. They have the brightness, and viewing angle of a traditional CRT, but also the fine detail from the physical pixels like an LCD. And the OLED panels can be a fraction of the thickness and weight of an LCD or plasma panel. A number of technological problems remain to be worked out, but progress is being made.

Samsung has made enough progress that the are ready to go into production. Last week, the company announced plans to start mass production of full-color OLEDs in the first quarter of next year. They intend to produce 1.5 million units per month (though they didn’t specify what size those units will be). Samsung has demonstrated prototype OLED HDTVs as large as 40-inches in the past, however, and the plant reportedly will use substrates that are about 30 by 37.5 inches, which could yield a single 40-inch panel, though they also could be used to produce many smaller displays for mobile phones. The company plans to increase production to 4 million units per month by the fourth quarter next year.

Samsung has announced plans to produce OLED panels before; they promised an OLED TV for 2005 that never materialized. This new announcement involves construction of a product line, however, so there is more reason to expect them to deliver this time. Don’t expect the ramp up of production to be smooth, as nasty surprises will undoubtedly arise. But 2007 could be the year that large OLED displays start to appear on the market in significant quantities.

New jargon alert: downconversion. You may have heard of upconversion; this refers to the process that some DVD players use to take standard definition DVD content and expand it to high definition resolution. This is a form of scaling that essentially fills in the “missing” data when the number of pixels is increased. Of course, it can’t know what’s missing — that only happens in the movies and TV crime shows — and your HDTV should be able to do this for itself, but the DVD player presumably has better scaling so maybe it will look better.

So what is downconversion? It’s the opposite of upconversion: taking a high definition image and throwing away pixels to make it standard resolution. Why would anyone want to do that? Cable operators want to do this to broadcast HD signals so that they can convert them to analog standard definition images that can be viewed by subscribers who don’t yet have a digital television. That’s fine with the broadcasters, but there’s another aspect of this. Current law allows cable operators to downconvert HD signals to digital standard definition signals. The only reason to do this is to save bandwidth on their systems. (There already is evidence the cable companies overcompress the digital HD signals to the point that the degradation is noticeable.) The broadcasters want the US Congress to require cable operators to deliver the HD content they receive as HD content to their subscribers.

This is a battle that is not likely to be resolved soon, but with the February 2009 deadline for ending analog broadcasts looming, it’s a topic you’re likely to hear more about in the future.

On long road trips, I used to get so tired of finding new radio stations every hour or so as I drove in and out of range. Now satellite radio makes it easy to listen to one music station (or an entire sporting event) without ever losing the signal. I expect that some drivers would like to have the same service for television for their passengers.

Well, now you can have it. KVH Industries has announced TracVision A7, which is a mobile satellite TV system including a hybrid phased array antenna that uses GPS to capture DirecTV satellite signals while in motion. The antenna is housed in a case that is roughly 32 inches square and only five inches thick. According to the company, the device has “whisper quiet” motors that keep the antenna aimed at the satellite.

I’m impressed by the technology, even if it is a tad expensive. I suppose that if you have passengers spending a lot of time in your car, and they want to be able to watch TV as they ride across the country, it sounds like a great solution. I still remember when in-car entertainment meant singing “There was a farmer who had a dog and Bingo was his name-o.”

Selling HDTVs online is a challenge. Buyers want to see the televisions in person, and want to be able to compare the image quality of different sets side by side. Amazon is trying to address buyers’ concerns by launching a new “Click-to-Call” HDTV call center. The idea is to provide a 24/7 live service where customers can call in and get buying advice. The company plans to eventually offer this for all models selling for $1,000 or more.

According to a company representative, Amazon’s TV sales have grown faster than the industry average. This is interesting, as the conventional wisdom is that buyers tend to research on the Web and buy locally. It will be interesting if customers respond to this free advice service by buying more TVs online.

I admire Amazon as a company, and am a frequent customer. There are some things that I hesitate to purchase online, however, and that includes displays. There were more than 850 new HDTV models released last year, and there’s no way that a single person can be totally current on all the quantitative and qualitative details about all those products, no matter how well trained they may be. I want to be able to see the image quality for myself, because I have found that manufacturer specifications are poor predictors of the display perfomance. I want to see the connectors, try out the onscreen menus, and run some of my own quick tests before I make my choice. At some time in the future, we may get to the point where all HDTVs are more or less the same, and it won’t be so hard to pick one. For now, however, I want to see for myself before I buy.

Would you like to know what I look for when I shop for an HDTV? Find out in Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV.

A press release by InStat projects that the number of households receiving HDTV services – cable, satellite, over the air, and IPTV — will swell from 15 million in mid-2006 to more than 20 million by the end of 2006. That’s a one-third increase in just six months. 91% of these homes will be in Japan and the USA. Yes, these are worldwide numbers, and that 20 million forecast is for the whole world, not just the USA. InStat also forecasts that the number will grow to more than 55 million by the end of 2009.

But what caught my eye was the little throw-away fact at the end. Only one-third of US homes with HD-capable televisions have HDTV service.

One out of three! That’s impressive. It means that people are buying these displays for some reason other than being able to watch higher-resolution images on them. It also could be that they get the serious sticker shock when they go to sign up for the service. I just got an offer in the mail from a service that I won’t name; after the initial period at a promotional rate, I would have to spend $110 per month to get HDTV signals from the company. That’s $1,320 per year, every year… unless they raise their rates! For that much money, I could buy a new 42″ set every year… or bigger if the prices keep coming down. So maybe it’s the high price of content that is keeping the adoption rate down in this country. I do know that this makes the free over the air digital broadcasts look mighty attractive to a cheapskate like me.

For a comparison of HDTV satellite services, click here.

The arms race of “mine is bigger” continues unabated as Samsung has announced that it will sell a 70-inch LCD HDTV in 2007. The company has announced that it will show the new display tomorrow, Wednesday, August 23, at the International Meeting on Information Displays in Daegu, South Korea. The new 1080p display incorporates 120 Hz refresh technology, designed to decrease motion blurring in LCD panels.

This is also another salvo in the war between plasma and LCD. Until recently, LCD owned the space for 37-inch displays and smaller, with plasma dominating from 40-inches and up. LCD has now matched prices with plasma in the 40- to 45-inch range, and is rapidly taking market share away from plasma. By announcing a 70-inch LCD, Samsung is declaring a willingness to compete at even larger sizes, where current options are limited to plasma and rear-projection. And competition generally means a win for the consumer.

So if you’re in Daegu tomorrow, drop me a line at alfred@hdtvprofessor.com and tell me how this new screen looks.

Almost every HDTV maker provides a rating for each model’s contrast. Contrast is simply a measure of how different the “blackest” black compares with the “whitest” white that the display can produce. Contrast is one of the most important performance factors for an HDTV, or any TV for that matter. Good contrast helps make the colors “pop”; poor contrast gives the image a washed-out look. The reason that you can’t read your cell phone display in bright sunlight is not that it lacks brightness so much as it lacks contrast.

So… if contrast is so important, then an HDTV that is rated at 10,000:1 contrast must be 10 times better than one rated at 1,000:1, right? Wrong. The manufacturer’s specifications actually are useless at predicting what sort of contrast you’ll experience when you install the set at home. The reason is that they use different methods of measuring. The most common method is to put the set in a blacked-out room, and then measure how much light comes off a totally black image. Then they measure the light from a totally white image, and do the math. The problem is that we don’t use HDTVs to watch all black or all white images in a dark room. (Network television is already boring enough as it is!)

There’s a better test, developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). This uses a checkerboard pattern of black and white squares as the test image, and the average black level is combined with the average white level to calculate the contrast.

The news is that you don’t have to take my word for this. A display industry organization has published numbers that indicate just how much difference testing make. The Plasma Display Coalition was created by five major manufacturers to promote plasma HDTVs. They recently sent out a very expensive glossy booklet touting “the ultimate home entertainment experience.” But the meat of the matter was on the back page where they reported “Independent Test Results”.

These tests were done by Roam Consulting, headed by Peter Putman. I know Pete personally, and hold his professional work in high regard. He tested one plasma HDTV from each of the five companies, and the measures included contrast. The booklet doesn’t report the published specifications for the test models, but many plasma HDTVs are now rated at 10,000:1. Using the ANSI test procedure, however, the average contrast for the five test models was only 500:1. That’s the average, folks; this implies that some may have scored better, but only if some scored worse.

The bottom line is that you can’t trust the manufacturers’ contrast specifications when comparing different HDTVs, especially when comparing plasma agains LCD or rear-projection. My best advice is to trust your eyes, and know what to look for when comparing sets.

For more information about the problems with manufacturers’ specifications and what to look for when you evaluate HDTVs, check out Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV.

Times are changing rapidly in the home entertainment market. We’re seeing all sorts of wired and wireless solutions being developed to bring audio and video entertainment, as well as telephone and information services to your home. But this raises the question of what happens to all this once it gets delivered there.

In the really old days — when the only choice was a rabbit ears on the TV or a rooftop antenna — the signal was delivered to a single set, and you sat in that room to watch it. Now, it’s common to split the signal and route it to various locations around the home. The most common solution is to run coax cable around with splitters and amplifiers, but many new homes are taking a home network approach, and are wiring runs of Cat5 Ethernet cable all over the place instead. You’re still limited to fixed locations where these wires terminate, however.

There’s another factor to consider. Wire is cheap, but installation labor is expensive. Retrofitting an existing home with new wires is even more costly because it’s more difficult to run wires within existing walls, and you have to be careful not to damage the the wall treatments.

As a result, it’s no surprise that so many companies are working on wireless ways to provide entertainment and information throughout the home. Bring all the services in to a single hub, and distribute it from there. For example, Amimon is a company in Israel that is developing a technology to deliver HDTV signals wirelessly. They demonstrated a prototype at InfoComm in Orlando last June, and have recently announced funding that will let them bring the product to market in early 2007. The system can transmit up to 100 feet, even through walls, and can send 1080p signals at a 3 Gb/s rate using a 40 MHz bandwidth segment of the unlicensed 5 GHz radio frequency band.

I expect that many homes will be completely wireless before long, as a single home network provides telephone, television, music, and Internet services to devices located anywhere within the house. The extra cost of the wireless connections will be much less than the cost of installing the wires, and this alone will drive its adoption. The freedom to use your phone or television or computer anywhere you want will simply be a bonus.