The Masked Engineer: Mario Orazio
DTV Sales: New Math
You might not have noticed that TV sets work and set-top
boxes don't. "Mario, what do you mean by that?"
This: Withdraw your life's savings and take a year
off. Go to your friendly, neighborhood electronics shop or supermarket
or drugstore and buy one of those $20 little TVs. Buy a ticket to
Punta Arenas, Chile, on the Strait of Magellan – an airport
from which planes fly to Antarctica. Take the TV with you. After
you land, turn on the TV. It works.
Buy a car. Start heading north on the Pan-American
highway. Every time you hit a new city, turn on the TV. Whether
you're in Santiago, Chile; La Paz, Bolivia; Lima, Peru; Quito, Ecuador;
Cali, Columbia; Colon, Panama; San Jose, Costa Rica; Managua, Nicaragua;
Tegucigalpa, Honduras; San Salvador, El Salvador; Guatemala City;
Mexico City; Los Angeles; Vancouver (the Canadian one); or whatever
passes for a city in the frozen tundra of that new Canadian province
called None-of-it (or something like that) – the TV will work.
Even if you're in lousy-reception conditions –
between skyscrapers, out in the boondocks, whatever – the TV
will work. If there's the barest hint of a signal, you'll hear sound.
And even a snowy, ghosty picture will give you a hint as to which
way to point the antenna.
Now try taking your cable box to the next town over.
Good luck! Maybe your cable op uses harmonically related carriers
and the next one over uses normal carriers. Maybe one of them is
so old it's even using inverted carriers for single-conversion tuners.
The program guides are probably different. The scrambling is probably
different.
Try using a Dish Network receiver to get DirecTV programming
(like HDNet). Try having your TiVo disk recorder figure out how
to record something based on your pal's connection to ReplayTV.
As they tell me they say in New York, "Fuggedaboudit!"
BODY-SNATCHING PODS
Our Beloved Commish said some cable boxes would have
to be sold in stores. So, to get around the security issues, the
cable folks came up with a renewable security module called a POD.
That stands for "point of deployment." I am not making
this up. It sounds like the place where the helicopter dropped the
commandos.
What POD has to do with the price of a movie channel
carrying "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is beyond my
meager capacities of comprehension.
So the POD spec has been out for a long time. Seen
any cable boxes in Ye Olde Electronics Shoppe? (Canadians, silence,
please; silence, Canadiens, s'il vous plait).
I didn't think so.
The POD covers conditional-access security, but it
doesn't deal with (drum roll, maestro, if you please) copy protection.
So, besides the POD, there's PHILA, which is neither the city with
the Liberty Bell nor the spreadable dairy product.
PHILA is the POD-Host Interface Licensing Agreement,
which ain't an agreement but a copy-protection scheme – sort
of. Does this make any sense to you? If so, could you please try
to explain it to me (in short sentences, with words of only one
syllable each)?
Anyhow, that's not what I woke Nellie-the-Neuron up
to rant about. But first, a word from this month's sponsor, last
month.
I love January. January is home to the Consumer Electronics
Show (CES). January is when Our Beloved Commish releases its annual
report to Congress on competition in the multichannel video programming
distribution (pronounced "cable and satellite") field,
based on data from the previous June (hey – these things take
time). January is when, even if you can't think of anything to write
about, someone is bound to shove a pedal extremity into an oral
cavity.
For instance, a pal-o'-mine showed me a paragraph
from the expensive and authoritative weekly industry newsletter
Television Digest. It's so authoritative that they can't even be
bothered with boring parts of speech like articles. Here are a couple
of sentences from their front-page story on CES in the Jan. 14 issue:
‘Numbers are misleading,' Shapiro said after
session: ‘1.4 million sold units includes all ‘DTV-ready'
along with DTV-capable sets. Actual number of ATSC-capable products
sold last year that met ATSC DTV specifications numbered about 297,000,'
he said."
If you're like me, you're probably puzzling over the
difference between "DTV-ready" and "DTV-capable,"
and trying to figure out what an "ATSC-capable" product
that didn't meet ATSC specifications might be. But it seems pretty
obvious that somebody named Shapiro found fault with something someone
else said, eh?
BZZZZZZT! Wrong! The person who presented the numbers
Shapiro called misleading was the same Shapiro – Gary Shapiro,
president of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA).
NEW MATH
Here's some more detail. According to CEA, 97,157
TV sets of any type (HDTV, 480p or plain 480i) that could decode
an ATSC DTV signal were sold by factories to American retailers
in 2001. "But, Mario, what's 297,000?" Oh, that's including
196,564 ATSC-decoder-equipped set-top boxes sold by factories to
retailers in 2001.
Yes, hon, I know the numbers don't add up to 297,000
if you use arithmetic; you have to use CEAlculus. And if you add
up all the ATSC decoders sold by factories to retailers since the
beginning of DTV you get a whopping 361,828 through the end of 2001,
almost five years after Our Beloved Commish issued its DTV rules.
Does that sound like a big number? For the seven-day
period from Nov. 24 through Nov. 30 of last year, the same CEA reported
the same kind of factory sales to retailers of DVD players to be
687,333. That was in one week, not 220 of them.
Around 29 million TV sets were sold by factories to
American retailers last year, according to estimates in a document
CEA had at CES (if you added up all the TV-set categories). That
would make the ATSC-decoder sales just about one percent of TV sales
– almost five years after the DTV rules went into effect. My,
my.
FAIRCOMPARISON
I ain't sure if that's a fair comparison. After all,
according to CEA, 98 percent of U.S. homes already have TV sets
(and have had them for decades). Methinks I should pick a less-mature
technology, like wireless phones. Not even counting the cordless
phones people use in their homes and offices, the CEA document estimates
53,400,000 wireless phones sold by factories to American retailers
in 2001. Now that's an impressive figure.
Looks like it's time to switch to Our Beloved Commish's
competition report (FCC 01-389, released Jan. 14, 2002). Where was
I? Oh, yeah. A whopping 361,828 ATSC decoders had made it into the
retail channel by the end of 2001. In the middle of the year, according
to Our Beloved Commish, 102,184,810 U.S. homes had TVs. So, if every
one of those 361,828 made it into a home, that's 0.35 percent.
Our Beloved Commish also said that 88,310,074 homes
had subscribed to a multichannel video-programming distributor (MVPD)
like cable or satellite by June (but there could be a wee amount
of overlap). That's 86.42 percent.
For those of you who don't keep a copy of the Balanced
Budget Act of 1997 handy, anything over 85 percent is enough (in
any particular market) to allow NTSC stations to be shut down at
the end of 2006. But it's only enough if those MVPDs carry at least
one channel of digital programming from each DTV station in a market.
Cable's in just 67.5 percent of TV homes, and there
ain't many DTV stations being carried on cable. Most of the rest
of the MVPD homes are satellite and there are approximately zero
DTV stations (give or take none) carried on DirecTV or DISH –
except by accident.
The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 said NTSC stays on
if 15 percent or more of households ain't got MVPD delivering DTV
programming and also don't have set-top boxes. So let's go back
to CES.
Methinks it was last year that about a dozen brands
showed new DTV set-tops at CES. This year, it was approximately
two.
"Mario, what's going on?"
I ain't all that clear on it myself, but methinks
it's got something to do with the proposed merger between DirecTV
and EchoStar. If it happens, it ain't likely that the combined company
will want to waste satellite spectrum delivering everything twice.
So, one or both of the existing satellite set-top schemes is probably
going to get junked.
If I had to guess, I'd say somewhere in the neighborhood
of 99 percent of ATSC decoders are associated with either DirecTV
(most of them) or Dish. Samsung's 150 model is one of the few that
ain't; the 160, one of the two new set-top ATSC decoders at the
show that is compatible with DirecTV and Dish.
That makes perfectly good sense to me. You want to
watch HDTV movies? Tune in HBO or Showtime via satellite or cable.
You want to watch HDTV sports? Tune in HDNet on DirecTV. About all
an ATSC decoder gets you – even if it's working perfectly and
every local station in your market is spitting out DTV – is
a soap opera, some primetime sitcoms and dramatic series, an occasional
movie, an occasional sporting event, and maybe even an opera or
two.
But, with the satellite merger confusing matters,
who wants to sell DirecTV-decoding ATSC decoders if it turns out
those are the ones the new company will dump? That also makes perfectly
good sense to me.
ULTIMATE GIVEAWAY
Ultimate Electronics, a big retail chain that has
different names in different parts of the country, has been giving
away ATSC set-top decoders (they call them $800 values) with their
high-resolution TV sets. As far as I can see (which ain't all that
far in my old age), they ain't jacking up the prices of the TVs
when they do that.
Well, gosh-darn if I don't find that downright interesting.
Are those folks taking an $800 hit on each TV? Do they think they're
selling more high-end TVs that way? Are they clearing out inventory
of set-top boxes they can't sell? If so, is that because they don't
work well enough or because they're from the satellite standard
about to be dumped. So many questions! So few DTV households!
So, let's go back now to Our Beloved Commmish's competition
report this year. TV households grew 1.37 percent from the last
report. But MVPD homes grew 4.6 percent. And DBS homes grew 23.74
percent. If things continue at roughly the current rates (call it
1.4 percent growth of TV homes and 4.5 percent growth of MVPD subscribers),
then by 2006 there'll be 110 million TV households and all of them
will subscribe to some MVPD service.
If Our Beloved Commish can somehow get those MVPDs
to carry DTV, then there won't be any need for any ATSC set-top
boxes, because everyone will get DTV via cable or satellite. Maybe
that's why the manufacturers didn't show new ones this year.
So it doesn't matter whether ATSC set-top boxes will
work or not, because no one will need them. That's a relief! But
if no one needs off-air reception, does anyone need off-air transmission?
My, my!
Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television
engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. Send your questions or
comments to him c/o TV Technology. Or drop him a note on e-mail
Mario_Orazio@imaspub.com.
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