This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CTA (Consumer Technology Association), which started out as the RMA (Radio Manufacturers Association). This is the fifth in a series of essays exploring and celebrating CTA’s and our industry’s first century of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship, assembled from varying technology historical research and writings I have done over the course of 20-plus years, including from an annually updated industry history for CTA’s now-defunct Digital America, 20-plus years of CTA Hall of Fame inductee biographies, and numerous tech history articles for a variety of publications over the years.
Here are the previous chapters:
Author Note: As with the last chapter on DVD, what follows is an updated and compacted version of a history of HDTV I wrote in 2003 for a now-defunct magazine called HDTV Etc. I don’t think the company that published that magazine still exists, so I feel free to plagiarize my own previously published HDTV history.
Sensing the frustration of the varying HDTV contestants in the wake of the ATTC test disappointments in the second half of 1991, ACATS chair Dick Wiley sent everyone a memo proposing they work together. Conflicting corporate interests, technical disagreements, suspicions, and snipings, put the kibosh on the idea – at least for the moment.
Wiley then added an incentive for an HDTV alliance by declaring that the new tests would cost each contestant an additional $612,000. By mid-May, all four groups had reluctantly ponied up half the evaluation fee and MIT moved its gear back to Virginia for the first round of re-tests.
But it was beginning to dawn on the HDTV contenders that retesting would simply result in the same conclusions – that none of the systems were going to pass Wiley’s muster. On May 19 and 20, 1992, representatives of all the affected companies met, argued, and negotiated at the Grand Hotel on M Street in Washington, D.C.
All Together Now
On Monday morning, May 24, Wiley took a phone vote. All six organizations – AT&T/Bell Labs, GI, MIT, Philips, RCA/Sarnoff, and Zenith – agreed to create a “Grand Alliance” to co-develop an American HDTV system. The primary decisions would be made by a Technical Oversight Group (TOG), comprised of eight chief engineers: Bill Beyers of AT&T, Bob Rast and Woo Paik from GI, Jae Lim from MIT, Philip’s Carlo Basile, Glen Reitmeier from Sarnoff, Don Leonard of Thomson, and Zenith’s Wayne Luplow.
In July, the Grand Alliance Groups met in Chicago to divvy up the work. AT&T and GI became unhappy bedfellows in constructing the compression encoder; Sarnoff would build the “transport,” which organized the digital bitstream; and, Philips would build the TV set decoders.
Over some strenuous objections, the emerging MPEG-2 digital video compression standard was mandated. In October, Dolby Digital (AC-3) was picked as the HDTV audio standard over competing systems from Philips and MIT. In January 1994, after a shoot-out competition with GI, Zenith got the job of designing the transmission system, which was called 8-VSB (8-level Vestige Side Band).
Dissenting voices and stalling tactics
Even before the establishment of the Grand Alliance, dissenting voices were beginning to be heard about the pending standards. The first came from the personal computer industry.
A brilliant idea (he said sarcastically) dawned on corporate TV and PC executives. Since a TV and a PC both require a display screen, perhaps the two devices could be combined. Suddenly, everyone was talking about “convergence,” and TV and PC companies started pairing off to create new TV/PC convergence products.
Except that TVs use interlace scanning and PCs use progressive scanning. As the Grand Alliance started coming together, voices within the alliance and from the PC business started shouting that progressive scanning be mandated as part of the system. Wiley deftly indicated that progressive scan was the ultimate goal, but interlaced formats would be developed for the time being.
By this time, it began to dawn on broadcasters that their HDTV bluff had been called. Their efforts to preserve their spectrum had committed them to a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure rehauling, with absolutely no profit potential at the other end. How could they worm their way out of their HDTV commitments – without losing their spectrum?
Over the next several years, broadcasters initiated several stalling tactics. The first came in early 1994 when broadcasters began to make noises about how HDTV was a waste of time. In Forbes Magazine, Rupert Murdoch was quoted as saying that HDTV was a luxury. An NAB executive posited that perhaps the additional spectrum could be put to other, more profitable, purposes – perhaps data services, or sub-divided into additional multiple channels, so-called multicasting. An amendment to the pending House telecommunications bill was actually proposed to allow broadcasters to use the second channel any way they wanted. It was defeated.
By this time, the idea of auctioning off spectrum, rather than simply licensing it to purely commercial enterprises, began to take hold in a budget-balancing-conscious Congress. HDTV advocates picked up on this political mood and started hinting none-too-subtly that if the broadcasters didn’t want to use the second channel for HDTV, perhaps the land mobile folks would still be interested. By the fall, broadcasters were back on the HDTV wagon – for the time being.
In mid-1994, a challenge to the Grand Alliance was mounted by proponents of a new modulation scheme called COFDM – Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. Tests were held to compare COFDM to Zenith’s 8-VSB and, although the former demonstrated a great ability to reduce ghosting, Zenith’s more potent system was eventually chosen – for the time being.
Throughout 1994 and into early 1995, the PC industry continued to complain about interlacing. Broadcasters continued to complain about the costs of building new transmission towers. Cable providers started to complain about “must-carry” rules that might force them to carry both the analog and the new digital channels at the same time. And a phalanx of Hollywood directors complained that the widescreen 16:9 standard would still mean their films would either be cropped or still require letterboxing.
Auction Fever
Meanwhile, the kids in the white coats continued tinkering. By September 1995, there had been several successful transmission field tests in Charlotte, NC. In December, Zenith announced that 8-VSB was finished, Dolby announced AC-3 was done, and Sarnoff indicated its transport was completed. GI had finished its half of the decoder, and Bell Labs its half a few months later. On March 10, the Grand Alliance 1080-line interlaced system was demonstrated for ACATS, and by March 31, the 720-line progressive scan system worked. In mid-April, the ATTC began its evaluation of the two digital formats, now officially adopted as the ATSC Digital Television Standard.
A week later, the FCC opened proceedings for comments on the proposal. FCC chair Reed Hundt proposed opening up the spectrum to auction, but couldn’t muster enough votes. To placate Hundt’s other misgivings, Wiley asked Robert Hopkins of the ATSC to come up with so-called “standard definition” formats, 480-line interlaced and progressive standards, in both 4:3 and 16:9 varieties. These additional standards brought the final total to 18 separate digital television formats, which were adopted by the ATSC on September 15.
In the meantime, more and more members of Congress had latched onto the idea of auctioning spectrum. In September 1995, Sen. Joseph Leiberman (D-CT) and Sen. Larry Pressler (D-SD) both made inquiries about spectrum auctions, and the FCC, prodded by Hundt, asked for comments on possible auctions. In October, a budget amendment sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) requiring the auction of the second channel lost 64-25. In January 1996, presidential hopeful Bob Dole insisted that spectrum auctions could garner the treasury $70 billion.
By the fall of 1995, pressure was mounting on a reluctant Hundt to set HDTV standards. On November 28, Wiley chaired the final meeting of ACATS. Despite protests from PC industry representatives, the motion to adopt the ATSC DTV Standard passed unanimously. On Dec. 12, the FCC finally opened hearings on the standard.
But it would be Congress who would make the next move.
Down the Stretch
After Dole promised fellow Republicans that he would not block it, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1995 on February 2, 1996. It was the first update of the country’s telecommunications laws in 60 years. It looked as if the broadcasters would get their free spectrum.
On May 9, the FCC finally took the final steps to adopt the ATSC standard by issuing a notice of rule-making – against Hundt’s protest. A few weeks later, Hundt heard from his former college roommate, NAB president Eddie Fritts. Fritts, along with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and three other congressional leaders, sent a letter to Hundt suggesting he get with the HDTV program.
On June 17, WRAL, the CBS affiliate in Raleigh, NC, applied for and received the first ATSC HDTV license. The station began HDTV data broadcasting on July 23. But the honor of the nation’s first commercial HDTV broadcast went to WRC, an NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C., which began HDTV transmissions at 9:45 pm on WHD-TV, channel 34. Except the only TV capable of receiving it was in the station manager’s office.
Throughout the rest of the summer, the powers that be continued their ATSC standard debate. In mid-July, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) urged adoption, then backed off a month later. The National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), the cable TV lobby, came out against the standard because of its fear of “must carry” rules and the difficulty of reconciling the ATSC’s 8-VSB scheme with cable’s Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) standard. In September, the Clinton administration, after prodding from Bill Gates, backed the PC industry’s anti-interlacing protests.
But the broadcasting and consumer electronics manufacturing lobbies soon reached an accommodation with the PC people. On November 25, 1996, the three enemies together urged FCC adoption of the ATSC standards.
Finally, on Christmas Eve, nine years after the formation of ACATS, the FCC took the plunge and adopted the ATSC standard.
But not the whole standard. The FCC mandated 8-VSB modulation, MPEG-2 encoding, and Dolby 5.1 surround sound, but none of the actual 18 ATSC formats. The FCC side-stepped the interlacing and aspect ratio traps by leaving it to the market to decide which specific formats to deliver. But the U.S. finally had a government-mandated digital television format.
Believe it or not, that was the easy part.
HDTV On the Air
On April 3, 1997, the other shoe dropped.
Despite final protests from senators Dole and McCain and numerous other politicians, the FCC officially “lent” more than 1,600 local broadcasters their second channels for HDTV transmission. Once the transition to digital broadcasting was made, the “borrowed” spectrum would be returned to the government for auction by January 1, 2006. “But as the broadcasters well know,” sighed a prescient Wall Street Journal writer, “things the government says will happen…years from now, usually don’t.”
In January 1998, TV manufacturers showed off the first HDTVs at CES. By September, the first HDTV sets, from Mitsubishi and Panasonic, reached stores – just in time for the first HDTV network broadcasts, due to begin November 1.
CBS jumped the gun on Thursday, October 29, when it broadcast the launch of the John Glenn space shuttle mission. And right on schedule, 23 local stations around the country began HDTV broadcasts on Sunday morning, November 1, 1998. Network HDTV broadcasting was inaugurated that evening on ABC with the movie, “101 Dalmatians” on “The Wonderful World of Disney.”
The following weeks saw myriad HDTV broadcasting firsts. CBS broadcast the first HDTV NFL game, the New York Jets versus the Buffalo Bills, on November 8. PBS broadcast its first HDTV program, “Chihuly over Venice,” a documentary on the Venice glass blower, the following night. The first regular season series HDTV broadcast was CBS’s “Chicago Hope” on November 18.
But the networks were now crabby about the lack of HDTV sets being sold. The problem was that broadcasters didn’t want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to pump out programming if no one had sets to watch them on. And consumers would only buy HDTV sets if there were something to watch.
This catch-22 was partially solved on May 9 when Mitsubishi announced it would sponsor CBS’s primetime HDTV schedule starting in the fall. Three weeks later, Panasonic announced it would loan ABC HDTV gear so the network could broadcast Monday Night Football games and Super Bowl XXXIV in HD. This started a trend in manufacturer-sponsored network HDTV fare.
The Modulation Wars
Despite these sponsorship deals, there was still a great deal of broadcaster grumbling. They liked free spectrum, thank you very much. They just didn’t want to use it for HDTV.
Sinclair, a 59-station broadcast group based in Baltimore, decided the best delaying tactic was to challenge the underlying technology of the ATSC standard – 8-VSB modulation. In mid-1999, Sinclair asked the FCC to reconsider 8-VSB and allow broadcasting using COFDM instead.
During the summer of 1999, Sinclair orchestrated a series of well-publicized demonstrations to illustrate the supposed inferiority of 8-VSB and the equally supposed superiority of COFDM. The heart of the argument was that 8-VSB was prone to something called “multipath distortion” – the tendency of an HDTV signal in a heavy urban area to bounce off buildings and create double images. COFDM was not prone to these problems.
The FCC decided to conduct its own tests. On September 30, the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology report concluded that multipath distortion of the otherwise more robust 8-VSB would eventually be solved and that “the relative benefits of changing the DTV transmission to COFDM are unclear and would not outweigh the costs of making such a revision. OET therefore recommends that the ATSC 8-VSB standard be retained.”
Instead of discouraging Sinclair or its allies, this report emboldened them. Between lawsuits, new testing, adoption hearings, et al, pushing this COFDM thing could delay expensive HDTV implementation for years to come. So, on October 11, Sinclair and nearly 300 other stations officially petitioned the FCC to revise the ATSC standard. Three weeks later, the COFDM ranks had swelled to nearly half of all the nation’s public and commercial stations.
On February 4, 2000, the FCC summarily tossed Sinclair’s petition but left the door open to further review. In March, the ATSC agreed to consider including COFDM in the U.S. standard. In June, ABC and NBC jointly asked the FCC “to continue to gather more evidence on the performance of 8-VSB,” suggesting a new six-month technical review.
The modulation debate was not the only HDTV fire the FCC was forced to quelch. There was still no cable compatibility despite ongoing negotiations between HDTV manufacturers and cable providers. Hitachi and Toshiba were selling sets labeled “HDTV-ready” that weren’t really, forcing the FCC to step in and define exactly what “HDTV-ready” really meant. And several broadcasters were once again floating the idea of using the second channel for multicasting – or simply leasing it outright – instead of using it for HDTV.
By the summer of 2000, Congress was hopping mad. House Telecommunications Subcommittee chair Billy Tauzin (R-LA) told the parties to get their acts together – or else face strict government mandates.
The FCC got the message. On January 19, 2001, the FCC reaffirmed 8-VSB once, for all, and forever. The commission also eased the cable hurdle by not requiring cable operators to carry both analog and digital broadcasts from a single station.
Slow Uptake
The Sinclair brouhaha was the last major organized attempt to derail the transition to digital television. In the first few years of the new century, efforts were made to address as many of the remaining problems as possible.
In May 2001, the one-millionth digital television was sold. Cable, satellite, and TV manufacturers were coming closer to an agreement on standardized digital connectors with copy protection software. The TV networks, with the visible exception of Fox, put more and more HDTV programming on the air.
In May 2003, all commercial TV stations were required to start digital broadcasting, but hundreds of stations applied for extensions. As of late February 2003, less than half – 768 stations – had made the transition.
Three issues continue to plague HDTV adoption: broadcaster transition/spectrum recovery, cable compatibility, and consumer acceptance.
As to the first issue: The FCC delayed pre-auctions of recoverable spectrum a half dozen times because it was uncertain when – if ever – the spectrum would ever be recovered. The FCC introduced several initiatives to coax broadcasters to get digital and give up their borrowed spectrum, largely to little effect. On New Year’s Eve 2001, FCC Commissioner Michael Powell reluctantly admitted just how intractable broadcasters were concerning their spectrum. “[B]ased on the way the DTV transition works, [the spectrum] will be occupied for a very long time absent a change in the law. It’s not coming back in 2006.”
The second issue was addressed when, on December 19, 2002, TV makers and cable operators agreed on a set of “plug-and-play” specifications to make all digital televisions HDTV cable compatible.
As to consumer acceptance, for all the contentious efforts of technology companies, broadcasters, and the government, only five million HDTVs had been sold by early 2003. HDTV programming was still spotty, DVDs were not high-def, and new HDTV TVs were expensive and didn’t exactly show off HDTV as it was designed. Mainstream consumers just couldn’t see what the fuss was all about.
Despite HDTV’s initially slow consumer uptake, Wiley had been widely recognized for his indispensable role as an independent arbiter in the platform’s creation. In 1993, he was named to the Broadcasting & Cable magazine Hall of Fame, in 1996 he was recognized by the EIA with a medal of honor, in 1997 he was awarded an Emmy for his HDTV work, in 1999 he was named one of the top 100 Men of the Century by Broadcasting & Cable magazine, in March 2002 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Award by NAB, and in 2009 he was named to the CTA Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame.
HDTV may have arrived despite a snake pit filled with conflicting profit, pride, political, power, and product motives. But apparently, there were still more miracles needed – such as big, widescreen displays to effectively exhibit HDTV’s excellence, a high-definition DVD format, and a firm government transition mandate – that would be needed to make HDTV a 21st-century must-have.
Stay tuned.
See also: CTA Centennial Part 6g (1985-2000): Platform Wars – HDTV (Part 1)
