HDTV Almanac

A report by China Daily on Wednesday indicates that some Chinese TV manufacturers may be banding together to negotiate lower royalty rates for the patent licenses required to build televisions with digital tuners for the United States Market. All TVs must have digital tuners starting next March.

According to the report, the Chinese government claims that manufacturers have to pay $23 per unit to include an ATSC tuner. That is not a burdensome addition to the product costs if the device costs $10,000, or even $2,000. But the little 15″ LCD TVs sell for under $200, and more than 10% of the retail price just for the tuner licensing fee is clearly a competitive burden. The equivalent royalties for the European DVB-T standard tuners are reported as only $1.

Whatever the accurate figures may be for this situation, it shines a spotlight on an issue that is part of almost all high-tech consumer electronic products. As the production costs fall and the volumes increase, licensing fees can become a major part of the total cost and manufacturers will sooner or later push back to get an equivalent reduction. With China making 50 million TVs a year, a potential cost of $1o billion just for tuner licensing fees is a lot of money. And the companies collecting those fees are counting on the income, so they won’t give them up without a fight. The power of licensing fees is why we have not seen a compromise between HD DVD and BluRay high-definition DVDs. So don’t ignore the power of the patent when looking at the costs of products.

Q: I am an amateur radio operator and I want to get a flat panel TV that will be in the same room as the radio transceivers. I am concerned about the new TV producing any interference for the radio. I do not get any noise from the LCD monitor on my computer in the room, though I did with the regular CRT monitors. Are plasma models as free of RF noise as the LCD units?

A: It’s an excellent question. I do know that most LCD TVs are going to be exactly like your LCD monitor in terms of RF (radio frequency) interference. The only question I would have would be about the new models that try to reduce motion blur by pulsing the backlight at 120 Hz.

I’m less certain about the plasma, because the way they generate images requires high voltages. Having said that, however, I will also point out that many plasma TVs have Class B FCC certification, so presumably any RF emissions would be limited. I also cannot find many sites on the Web that cite complaints about RF emissions from plasma panels.

Being an empiricist, I’d be tempted to take a cheap AM radio to a show room, tune to an empty frequency, and wave it around the screen to see if it’s generating much “static”. My suspicion is that you’ll find both LCDs and plasma to be clean, but if one of the technologies is more likely to give you problems, I’d bet it will be the plasma.

Toshiba has released a statement indicating the the company will not be showing the SED HDTV displays at CES next month in Las Vegas. CNET reports that a company spokesperson said that the reason for the cancellation is neither “technical or business”. While this does not seem to leave much much room for other causes, some analysts have speculated that it could be related to a lawsuit over licensed technology, which is credible.

Toshiba and their partner in the project, Canon, cannot afford to take too many hits from negative publicity. SED displays have wowed the participants at trade shows — including CES — in recent years, but the promised production dates keep getting pushed out in to the future. The latest targets were announced earlier last fall: production in mid-2007, with retail products appearing late 2007. The current announcement is silent on the subject of whether or not the release will be delayed yet again. I hope that they’ll be able to stick to their schedule; a lot of people are rooting for SED to become the third choice for flat panel television.

Circuit City reported its third quarter financials last week, for their third quarter ending November 30th. The net loss was $16 million. That’s a lot of money to lose, but it’s even larger when you compare it with the $10 million in profit the company posted for the same period a year ago. What happened? Black Friday gets its name from the fact that retailers have counted on it to put their companies “in the black” — showing a profit — for the year. The competition in consumer electronics this year was driven in large part by the HDTV market, and the major retailers adopted cut-throat strategies… even if it was their own throats that they were cutting.

So we can expect to see more tales of woe and red ink spilled on “Red Friday” this year. The high production rate of new product by manufacturers will likely help keep downward pressure on HDTV prices, however, so don’t expect the retailers to start singing a happier tune any time soon.

I’m off enjoying a high-definition holiday today, so I’ll just take this moment to thank all of you for your tremendous support in the past year, to wish you warm greetings of the holiday season, and to hope that you and yours enjoy a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year.

Peace,

Alfred Poor

Q: I’ve heard that in the near future, only those who have HDTV will be able to receive a tv signal and all the old tvs will be obsolete. This can’t be true, can it? Please advise.
Robert Romine

A: This is probably the question that I am asked second-most often. (The most frequent question is “Which HDTV should I buy?”) The sad part is that this question clearly demonstrates how much confusion is out there about digital television and HDTV, and it’s persistence is a measure of how ineffective the industry has been in explaining the situation. So I’ll keep answering the question as best I can.

Here is the basic fact; in February 2009, television broadcasters in the United States will cease broadcasting analog television signals. The only broadcast television signals at that point will be digital. (Satellite broadcast signals are already digital.)

Okay, that seems straightforward enough, but there’s still room for confusion. For example, not all the content broadcast by digital signals is HDTV, which means that it is not in high definition. Most television stations are already broadcasting digital signals in addition to their analog signals, and most of this content is broadcast in standard definition, even though it is digital.

What does this mean? It means that you won’t need an HDTV starting in February 2009; all you’ll need is a television with a digital tuner if you want to receive terrestrial broadcast television signals. Yes, you could buy a new television; manufacturers are required to include digital tuners — sometimes called ATSC tuners — in all their models as of next March. However, you can also buy a separate tuner that will connect to your existing television set. Your set won’t be able to display the full detail of HDTV, but you will be able to view digital broadcasts. And the federal government will have a program that will help consumers pay for such devices by the February 2009 deadline. I expect that the cost of a digital tuner will end up being $25 to $50, and possibly even less.

And keep in mind that this only matters if you use an antenna to get your television programming. If you use a satellite dish or a cable connection, you will be unaffected by the February 2009 cutoff. Less that 25% of the U.S. homes will be impacted by the end of analog broadcasts.

A friend sent me a link to a product called “PCShowBuzz” that promises to give you access to more than 1,000 movie, news, sports, and music channels on the Web. My friend wanted to know if this product was for real, or was it a scam of some sort.

The answer is that it’s a little of both. I have not tested this producted myself, but based on the research I have done about it, it appears to be a program that puts a nice front end on services that you can find for free anyway. If you search on Google for “streaming video channels”, you’ll find a lot of choices including sites such as Beeline TV which lists more than 100 streaming video channels. You can find a wide variety of content in a range of languages. Are you studying Spanish or French? Watch broadcasts in those languages to practice your comprehension. In general, you use a standard media player to watch the content, with RealPlayer, Quicktime, and Microsoft Media Player being the most popular choices. Most of the streams have low resolution and you’ll still need broadband for good results, but they’re free and the content ranges from blah to wow!

Do you need to pay for a product that makes it easy to find these free channels, and to make it easy to select them? It depends on what your time is worth. But if you’re willing to do a little exploring, there’s a ton of fun and informative content available on the streaming video channels on the Web.

Of all the sources of comparitive reviews of consumer products, I hold Consumer Reports in very high regard. This is the company that essentially established the field, and they generally are careful and precise in their testing and reporting. I discovered when I was deeply involved in personal computer testing over the past 20 years that Consumer Reports did not always have the expertise or resources to test some technical products in depth, however, in ways that provided meaningful results for their readers.

As a result, I was discouraged but not completely surprised by a press release from Naked News this week that tracked the scores given various HDTV products by the magazine, and found some unexplained discrepencies. For example, one Samsung 32″ LCD scored 62 points in the recent December issue, but the same model received only 46 points in the issue published just one month earlier. The Naked Truth reported that seven different models had their ratings change in a just a one-month span.

If you’ve read some of my materials, you know that I have taken the position that it is impossible to adequately test HDTVs comprehensively and consistently, and this makes all comparitive reviews difficult to use. It is sad that Consumer Reports is the one to provide such strong evidence supporting my position on the subject, but quite frankly, if Consumer Reports can’t get it right, who do you think can? The bottom line is that you should not rely on product reviews to do much more than report the specifications; if you want meaningful and useful information to help you compare products, be prepared to gather that information yourself.

If you want to learn how you can quickly and effectively evaluate HDTV performance for yourself, see Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV.

I’ve been testing a bunch of different IPTV services, and some of them leave me unconvinced that they’re an improvement on traditional broadcast. In some cases, I’m not even sure that they are as good. But there’s a new effort underway to make IPTV work: The Venice Project. According to its Web site, this is a new venture that aims to deliver video entertainment content over the Web. They launched a beta last week, which uses peer-to-peer file streaming so that content owners can make their programming available to viewers. The process is protected against unauthorized copying, and the developers are working within the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Why give this project any more attention than the dozens of people out there who are working on IPTV systems? One reason is that the folks behind this are the same people who brought you Skype. So these clearly are people who understand what it takes to be bring a new vision to the Web and society on a broad scale. Past success is no guarantee of future success, but they certainly have the street cred to make this work. If you want to see what they’ve come up with, they’re still accepting applications for beta testers, though they don’t promise that everyone who applies will be selected.

One of the reasons that people prefer LCD and plasma flat panels over rear projection models is that you can “hang them on the wall“. Never mind that fewer than 25% of buyers ever do that. For a 42″ or larger screen, you could be dealing with hanging 100 pounds or more: not your typical family photo. And then there’s the question of what to do with the wires. When you put a large plasma or LCD panel on a tabletop stand, the overall depth is about the same as many rear projection models of a similar screen size.

All the same, a number of manufacturers are addressing the problem of how to make a thinner rear projection HDTV. JVC has just released two slim models. The 58″ HD-58S998 is only 10.7 inches deep, and will ship in January. The 63″ HD-65S998 is 11.6 inches deep, and will ship in March. Now, these models carry a premium price, even for 1080p resolution, but that’s the cost of creating more complex projection systems that result in the smaller case. But mount one of these on a “floating” shelf on your wall, and it should give you a viewing experience that will be at least as good as a flat panel on the wall. (You still have to figure out where the wires go, however.)

Confused about whether a rear projection HDTV is right for you? Get Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV.