HDTV Almanac

Okay, I was determined to maintain the HDTV Almanac as an iPad-Free Zone, but Steve Jobs has forced me to break my resolution. There are many amazing points to pick out of Wednesday’s announcement, but I’m just going to focus on the video part. First, consider these quotes from the iPad promotional video on the Apple Web site:

“The iPad is the best… movie-watching experience ever.”
Phill Schiller, Senior VP, Worldwide Product Marketing

“This is an unbelievable device for watching video. The quality of this video is amazing.”
Scott Forstall, Senior VP, iPhone Software

And finally, from the text on the iPad Web site: “The best way to experience the web, email, photos, and video. Hands down.”

Well, in my opinion it’s “thumbs down” on these typically hyperbolic claims by Apple. Even a momentary consideration of the specifications makes these claims dubious at best.

First, Apple gets all excited about the LED backlight and the IPS LCD panel. Hmmm… just about every notebook on the market these days has an LED backlight. There’s nothing amazing there. And IPS stands for “In-Plane Switching”, which is LG’s technology for wider viewing angles on LCD panels. It’s a good technology that has been around for a long time, but it’s hardly cutting edge.

A more stunning fact is that the iPad does not have a widescreen display. It is the same 4:3 aspect ratio as your grandmother’s Zenith picture tube TV had. Just about every netbook computer on the market has a 16:9 aspect ratio screen, but not the iPad. To make matters worse, however, the panel only has XGA resolution, which is 1024 by 768 pixels. Guess what? That’s not enough to even show 720p high definition images without scaling them down. And because the panel is not a widescreen, the result will be letterboxed. The best it can do is 1024 by 576, which is barely better than a widescreen standard definition format. And when letterboxed, the image size shrinks from 10 inches diagonal (actually, it’s just 9.7 inches) to a mere 8.9 inches.

How does watching a less-than-high definition 8.9 inch diagonal video image rate as “the best movie-watching experience ever“? Somehow, I would have picked a 1080p projector with a 100-inch screen and a 7.1 surround sound system in a home theater installation, or at least a 50-inch LCD or plasma flat screen HDTV. I don’t think a device like the iPad would ever occur to me.

Am I all wrong on this? Will you be trading your HDTV for an iPad as soon as you can? Let me know at alfred@hdtvprofessor.com.

Raymond Soneira is the creator of DisplayMate, which is an excellent program that can quickly tell you volumes about your display, whether it’s an HDTV, a computer monitor, a notebook, or even a cell phone. I used DisplayMate extensively for many years when I developed and used the display tests for PC Magazine, and they still use the program today in the product testing. While I don’t entirely agree with every conclusion Ray makes, I hold his work in the highest regard and trust his test results above all others.

Ray makes a wealth of information available for free on his Web site. Check out his mobile LCD display shoot out and his HDTV shoot out results in particular. And now he’s making his expertise and analysis even more readily available. He has started a DisplayMate Twitter account that you can follow through Twitter, or by going to the page on the Twitter Web site, or through an RSS feed. He explains why glossy screens for notebooks and mobile devices are a bad idea, and what’s wrong with local dimming on LED backlight LCD HDTVs. He explains why “dynamic contrast” is a meaningless specification. Many of his tweets include links to his Web site where you can find additional information on the subject that doesn’t fit within Twitter’s 140 character limit.

If you’re interested in displays and what really matters for image quality, you’ll want to follow the DisplayMate tweets.

If there’s a way to make money with YouTube, Google is sure to find it. The company is certainly trying enough different ways to generate revenue. Last week, YouTube announced that they will start renting movies. According to a company blog entry, an agreement with the Sundance Film Festival will make five films available for rent for $3.99 each through the end of January. You can find the films featured on the YouTube home page. Apparently, YouTube is focusing on independent film makers for the start, though the blog mentions “a small group of partners across other industries” that will be invited to participate in the program.

The size of the catalog is underwhelming, to say the least, and it’s hardly a bombshell commitment. On the other hand, it represents a new direction for YouTube, and it will be interesting to see if viewers are willing to pay for long form content from a site that is associated with free short videos. I suspect that without a much larger collection that appeals to a broader audience, YouTube is not going to become the go-to site for movies for most people.

But Google isn’t depending just on movie rentals to expand YouTube’s revenues. The company recently announced a deal to provide live worldwide coverage of a sporting event. Starting on March 12, it will stream all 60 matches of the Indian Premier League tournament. (That’s cricket, if you’re not familiar with the IPL.) The programming will be shown free, supported by advertising. The content will be shown on a dedicated YouTube channel. Sadly, this coverage will not be available in the U.S.; you have to go to fee-based Willow.tv for the IPL coverage in this country.

Keep throwing the spaghetti, Google. Something’s bound to stick.

China News Daily reported last week that more than 2,000 workers demonstrated at a touch panel plant owned by a Taiwanese company to protest pay disputes and unsafe working conditions. According to the protesters, at least four workers have died from over-exposure to hexane, a toxic solvent used to clean the panels. Some other reports indicated that workers may have also been upset about rumors that year-end bonuses were to be cancelled.

According to the article, Chinese government officials denied that any workers had died from exposure to hazardous materials at the plant.

This is just one report of many that indicate that production costs for Chinese technology factories may start to rise. As workers protest pay and working conditions, the government is likely to start enacting — and enforcing — laws that provide more protection for workers. As one economist has stated, China has been exporting deflation to this point, but the pendulum is swinging and the country will start exporting inflation as their citizens demand a higher standard of living. The per capita income for China is just $3,200 a year, with many workers earning as little as $100 a month.

This could certainly cause the cost of our imported goods to rise, but another possibility is that the production will continue to migrate to areas of lower costs. Vietnam, India, and Brazil are all cited as countries that could take the place of China for high-tech product manufacturing.

One of Taiwan’s top two LCD manufacturers, AUO, has announced that it is buying some technology (intellectual property) and other assets from Field Emission Technology (FET). FET was a spin-off from Sony that was develop and manufacture field-emission displays (FEDs), but during last year’s economic downturn, the company balked at spending the $300 million required to buy the manufacturing facilities from Pioneer.

FEDs are a flat panel display technology that were in vogue in the research community about 10 years ago. They match the active matrix backplane of an LCD with the phosphor screen of a CRT. Instead of liquid crystals, the backplane has hundreds of microscopic electron emitters behind each sub-pixel. The result is a very thin display with CRT-like response times, and since the display is emissive, the color performance and viewing angle are capable of the same excellent quality of a CRT. Unlike a CRT, however, there are no alignment, convergence, or screen geometry issues.

The problem is that it turns out that FEDs are not as easy to make as was initially thought. The electron emitters had lifetime limitations, and there were other complications. As a result, most of the major companies abandoned their FED research efforts. Sony was one of the last one standing when they folded FET’s tent last year.

So here comes AUO, which has also made commitments to the bistable displays used in ebook readers, and to OLED displays widely used in cell phones and portable media players. Apparently the company believes that it can make FEDs work as high-end displays for professional applications like TV studios. This is the same market targeted by the ill-fated (and similar technology) SED panels backed by Canon. At this point, AUO’s success with FED technology has to be ranked as a long shot, but sometimes long shots do win.

Earlier this week, the FCC ruled that cable companies that control local content — such as professional sports games — must make the programming available to other services, including satellite systems like DirecTV and DISH Network. This closes what has been called the “terrestrial loophole“. It got its name from the fact that any programming that used satellite connections for any portion of its distribution had to be made available to other subscription TV services. If the programming is only transmitted through terrestrial connections – such as phone lines or microwave radio — then the local station didn’t have to share it.

This created problems in some markets — such as New York, Philadelphia, and San Diego – where local cable companies have exclusive rights to professional sports home games. The new ruling will clear the way for the satellite services to carry this programming.

Naturally, the satellite companies are hailing the decision as a major victory for the consumer. The cheering may be premature, however, as the lone dissenting commissioner, Robert McDowell, pointed out. He said that the decision went beyond the FCC’s “statutory reach” and that it was open to a legal challenge. I expect this matter to end up in the courts before it is implemented, and even if it is upheld, it could be a long time before satellite subscribers will be given the opportunity to see these local games on their screens.

According to a report last week in Television Broadcast, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) expects to get more than $2 billion for the U.S. television broadcast rights for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. NBC paid nearly $0.9 billion for the 2009 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China, and according to the network’s annual report, lost $150 million in the deal. (NBC continues to broadcast programming from those events on their Universal Sports channel, however, so the books aren’t entirely closed yet on the earnings for that content.)

If $2 billion sounds like a lot of money, you’re right, even if it is spread over two sporting events with worldwide scope. It’s still surpassed by the contracts for the broadcast of NFL football games. According to Sports Business Daily, the average annual licensing fees for the NFL telecasts total more than $3.7 billion annually.

Now, keep in mind that this is just the fee to set up shop. It does not include the equipment, sets, production and support staff, on-air talent, marketing, and a myriad of other expensive details. And these billions of dollars have to be made back in advertising revenues and subscriber fees. And we can reasonably expect to see at least some of the 2016 Games in 3D. Keep that in mind when you dream about new models for content distribution that are free to the consumer without advertising. Someone’s got to pay these billions of dollars a year if we want to see football or the Olympics on our high-definition screens.

Q: I was visiting someone with a high definition TV. When they play back DVDs (normal ones, not Blu-ray), the images were letterboxed with black stripes on the top and bottom of the screen. What gives? I expect letterboxing on a square CRT but not on a widescreen HDTV. The TV plays HD broadcast channels in full screen mode just fine.
Michael Horowitz

A: You’re certainly not alone in your observation, Michael. Lots of people complain about the black bars above and below or to the sides on their HDTVs. You can get rid of them, but it would be wrong. There are good reasons for them to be there.

In the case you cite, the bars above and below are there probably because the movie was filmed in CinemaScope. This is a cinema format that is wider than the 16:9 aspect ratio used on HDTVs. CinemaScope has an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 (which is the same as a 21.15:9 ratio). So how do you fit a wider image into the 16:9 screen?

Your choices are to trim the sides off the picture to make it fit the 16:9 screen, or simply stretch it vertically to fit. Both of these approaches eliminate the black bars of letterboxing, but the first cuts off some of the image and the second will distort it noticeably like making the actors look skinny. (I hate to see cars driving down the street on oval wheels. Many people find that once they start noticing these distortions, it’s so distracting that they can’t pay attention to the movie. It’s like all the times that the boom mike appeared in the shots in “Out of Africa”.)

That leaves doing the right thing: letterboxing. You get the full image in its normal aspect ratio so sizes are not distorted. Yes, you end up “not using” part of that big screen TV that you paid good money to buy, but I believe this will result in the best quality viewing experience. (If the black bars bother you too much, just drape curtains over the top and bottom portions, and pretend you’re in a movie theater.)

The other case where you get black bars to the sides occur when you are viewing a standard definition image (4:3 aspect ratio) on a wide screen. You can “zoom” the image to fill the screen — which cuts off content from the top and bottom — or stretch it to fill the screen which makes everyone look short and fat. (The last two hotels I stayed in had widescreen flat panel TVs in the room, but they were set to stretch SD content to fill the screen, and it made me nuts trying to watch it.) Once again, the best quality image will be the one with the black bars on the sides.

“TV Everywhere” is the moniker given by subscription video services to their attempts to let their subscribers watch their content through a streaming connection over the Internet. It makes sense; if I’m already paying for the content, why can’t I “tune in” over a broadband connection to see whatever my set top box can deliver?

It’s a nice idea, but it raises some thorny issues. Are the cable (and satellite and phone) companies distributing the content over the Internet, which could be an unlicensed use of the content? And what about security? Can the services guarantee that the content won’t leak out so that everyone can access it?

DISH Network has announced plans for another way to untie this knot. They will simply include Sling Box functionality in subscriber set top boxes (and retrofits to some existing set top boxes) that will allow individual subscribers to “dial into” their own set top box over the Internet. And if that box includes DVR functions, then they’ll be able to access that recorded content as well.

This plan is made easier by the fact that DISH Network’s parent company, EchoStar, bought Sling Box, which keeps it all in the family. And since it’s a point-to-point connection to equipment in the subscriber’s home, it’s not the same as making program streams available from the company’s servers. This certainly could serve as a model for making broadband access to broadcast video content available on a subscription basis. It remains to be seen whether consumers will choose this arrangement, or will vote with their dollars for some other configuration.

Earlier this month, the market research firm BIGresearch released their results for the top five retailers for consumer electronics for December 2009. According to the company press release, nearly one-third of all adults (18 years old or older) surveyed indicated that they shopped at Best Buy most often when looking for electronics. Walmart was close behind, with one in five shoppers citing it as their preferred store.

Source: BIGresearch

The “CEI” figure is a measure of how much the consumer ratings for that store have increased. A score of 100 would indicate no change over the prior year. Of the top five retailers, Best Buy actually posted the smallest share growth but this makes sense given that it started with a large share. Amazon posted the biggest CEI increase in share; while its total number is small, it does indicate that people are more willing to shop online for certain electronics.

The big take-away from these numbers, however, is that Best Buy and Walmart apparently command control of more than half the retail consumer electronics market in this country. This could mean that it will be difficult for another competitor to enter the market, taking the place of Circuit City or CompUSA. And it also likely signals continued hard times for the small stores that specialize in high-end audio/visual equipment. Now that the holiday buying season is over, we have seen a spate of closing announcements among some of these small chains. Bernie’s in New England has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and has started liquidation sales, and in the Los Angeles market, Ken Crane’s has closed four of their 10 stores.

All of this is a logical contraction of the retail marketplace, as the differences between products become smaller and the profit margins grow even thinner. Success in this market is all about shelf space and mind share, which favors major brands and highly-efficient retailers who can deal in massive volumes at low margins.