Catching Up in TV Technology Won’t Be Easy

There’s no mistaking the worry over high-definition television (HDTV), the new big-screen, clear-picture kind of TV that’s supposed to be coming to market in the 1990s from Japan.

An all-star lineup of American companies is considering pooling resources to try to come up with a product or system to match Japanese advances. Such top names as IBM, Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard and Apple in computers, American Telephone & Telegraph in telecommunications, Motorola and Texas Instruments in electronics, and Zenith--the only surviving U.S.-owned TV maker--put up $50,000 apiece last week just to devise a business plan for a research consortium on advanced TV.

The high-tech stars are getting involved with the boob tube because they recognize that HDTV is not just a pretty picture. Because it increases the picture-defining lines and color points in a television receiver, HDTV produces an image as clear as a movie print--and promises advances in computer graphics, medical imaging and desktop publishing. Because HDTV stores and processes TV signals, it uses vast numbers of semiconductors--and therefore promises the leader in HDTV further leadership in the electronics industry. The U.S. government says HDTV will be a $20-billion market within 10 years.

High stakes. Is American business a good bet for second-half comebacks? Maybe in some fields, but not in all--and in this one it won’t be easy.

Will Change Global TV

HDTV has been years in development, after all. And it will change global television as much as the 1953 switch to color--which split the world, with European countries adopting different systems from the United States and Japan. HDTV promises to remedy that long-ago split by offering a universal production and transmission standard that will make it easy to transfer programming around the world.

So program producers in Hollywood, and viewers everywhere, can cheer the coming of HDTV. But mostly Americans are wringing their hands, because everyone knows it’s different this time. In the 1953 switch to color, CBS and RCA offered the new systems. But HDTV was developed by Japan’s national broadcasting company, NHK--and no U.S. system is even in the picture.

Not all Americans were asleep. Some companies worked on HDTV for decades; inventors such as William E. Glenn, director of the New York Institute of Technology, sought backing for advanced television systems. But U.S. chances diminished as one company after another left the TV-making business.

Research Slipped Away

“It all happened because people didn’t think far enough ahead,” says William Connolly, now president of Sony Advanced Systems and an engineer who served 23 years with CBS before it disbanded its research laboratories several years ago. “When U.S. companies chose to find profit in marketing the product and not manufacturing it, they moved manufacturing offshore. But they ignored the fact that research supports manufacturing, and so when manufacturing is gone there’s no reason to do research.”

“Now there are those who look back and say that was wrong,” he adds, “that we need to revitalize that industry and that research.”

Meanwhile, in Japan, NHK--which is funded by license fees from TV set owners and by the Japanese government--assigned engineer Takashi Fujio in 1970 to develop advanced television. And 17 years and $700 million later, he succeeded and has won approval for his system from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in Hollywood, who studied it for five years.

HDTV is not yet perfected, although cameras and production equipment are closer than the TV sets. At the Osaka research center of Matsushita, maker of Panasonic sets, a high-definition model the size of a refrigerator is on display. Engineer Fujio, who now works for Matsushita, explains that he needs to shrink the signal processing unit.

In any case market projections are distant and vague--widespread use of HDTV is predicted by 2000, although sets at that time might still cost $1,500. Clearly there is time for U.S. industry to come back, but it no longer has the players.

Only Zenith still makes televisions, and it is hanging by its fingernails in a business that has become a competitive charnel house where Korean newcomers give even Japanese giants fits. No U.S. firm is likely to invest in such a business, with or without government support. The major U.S. companies now talking about pooling research are looking at HDTV for its related products and technologies in computers and electronics.

However, their efforts are likely to yield a future better than the past. It’s a good bet that the telephone and computer companies will come up with advances in graphics and medical imaging, that electronics firms will push the frontiers of semiconductor technology. One loss doesn’t have to be the season, if U.S. companies recover the knack of looking far enough ahead.