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CBS Threatens to Quit and Take Their Digital Ball and Go Home |
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The LA Times (reg. req.) reports that Viacom, parent of the CBS television network, is threatening to stop transmitting HDTV if there is no broadcast flag mandate
(Viacom Asks FCC to Prevent HDTV Piracy).
In comments filed Dec. 6, Viacom told the Federal Communications Commission that it would transmit no HDTV in the 2003-04 season unless the commission mandated "broadcast flag" technology to deter digital TV broadcasts from being retransmitted over the Internet.
CBS has been a leader in HDTV broadcasts, so does this really make any sense? After all, if they are worried about piracy, they should stop broadcasting digital immediately regardless of the FCC's actions. Moreover, do they think that people are more likely to pirate digital versions of CSI rather than analog version that will continue to be broadcast? Such a move will have no effect on piracy whatsoever, but will idle expensive technology investments. Really, what this shows is Viacom's contempt for the intelligence of the FCC and the consumer. [via Gigalaw]
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Re: CBS Threatens to Quit and Take Their Digital Ball and Go Home (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, December 13 @ 10:02:02 EST | This was bound to happen. The FCC forced Digital transmission on the industry even though there really isn't demand for it. Sure it is slowly catching on in the cable industry, but since the majority of Americans have cable, that lessens the need for transmission even more.
" Moreover, do they think that people are more likely to pirate digital versions of CSI rather than analog version that will continue to be broadcast?" Uh, yeah. What cave have you been in? With digital transmission the consumer can save it on his hardrive and email it to his buddy in the UK or wherever. This terrifies the industry, rightly so. |
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Re: CBS Threatens to Quit and Take Their Digital Ball and Go Home (Score: 1) by HowardGilbert on Friday, December 13 @ 14:47:49 EST (User Info | Send a Message) http://www.yale.edu/pclt | This article repeats the same mistake made throughout most posts on this site. HDTV is not the same thing as Digital TV. The DTV transition is in progress. We can wonder if it will actually end in 2006, but it is going to happen eventually because, at some point, a rational country will realize that electronic technology has made some progress since the NTSC standards were developed a half century ago. And we don't need the broadcast bit to get DTV because digital 480i (conventional TV resolution) is essentially the same picture as analog 480i.
CBS did not say it was going to stop digital broadcasting. It said it was not going to offer programs in HDTV. That makes perfectly good sense. CBS reflects a perfectly reasonable outcome of the broadcast bit controversy. There will be no broadcast bit. There will be a digital TV transition mandate. Every station will broadcast 480i digitally. In exchange for their conversion cost, every current TV station will be able to broadcast 4 current definition TV programs over their four digital subchannels. If they can find the content, they should be able to recover costs from 4 times as much advertising time. People with big TV screens can use them to watch DVDs. Movie studios that don't want to license movies for HDTV broadcast will continue to distribute them on DVD, cable, and 480i broadcast.
A mandate that every digital TV channel contain a 480i version of their current analog broadcast actually simplifies the tuner/converter problem. Existing TVs then only need a converter box that can turn 480i digital to analog. Actually, everyone already has most of this circutry already in a DVD player that costs $70. You just don't need the DVD part. You need a tuner, 8VSB modulator, and an MPEG decoder that can expand 480i. The reason why existing Digital TV tuners are so expensive is that an MPEG decode for 720p or 1080i is still a high performance exotic device, while chips to decode 480i are in every DVD and dirt cheap.
I don't think many people care if CSI is really High Definition. Football games can still be broadcast in HDTV, but then with the realization that there isn't much of a black market for last week's game. |
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