New Era Dawning in Home Entertainment

High-definition television sets went on sale in Tokyo last week, the first models of a new sharp-picture, wide-screen type of TV that will become a fixture of home entertainment in this decade.

But don’t expect one in your living room soon--even if you live in Japan. The lowest priced set in Tokyo--a Sony model--goes for $17,000, and the technology isn’t really perfected yet. U.S. consumers can expect HDTV by the mid-’90s.

And by then, television and personal computers will have begun to take on a whole new meaning in home entertainment. HDTV, say experts, is the first step in a decade of developments that will confirm the old science fiction stories; like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, you’ll be able to converse with video screens in the wall.

As a television set, HDTV will be only an incremental improvement on today’s TVs. But the computing abilities that will come along with HDTV will be a revolution.

That’s why businesses on three continents are already moving forward with combinations of computing and TV. N V Philips of Holland and Sony and Matsushita of Japan are bringing out video compact discs with which users can interact to call up televised lessons from encyclopedias.

Intel, a U.S. electronics firm, recently launched a video microprocessor, called Digital Video Interactive, that allows users to manipulate moving figures in a combination television and personal computer.

Such efforts are only the beginning, but they are forcing companies to see their business in a new way. For example, Sony, one of the world’s leading developers of consumer electronic products--tiny radios, the Walkman, the Trinitron TV set, HDTV--is now intent on moving into computers.

“Computers and communications are going to have to augment video and audio in new markets,” says Neil Vander Dussen, president of Sony Corp. of America. Sony already makes computer workstations and small computers, called palmtops, under its own name. And it also makes the monitors, disk drives and some semiconductor components for Apple Computer--as well as manufacturing Apple’s laptop--which may be significant because a recurring rumor in Silicon Valley predicts that Sony will acquire Apple.

Asked about Apple, Vander Dussen responds only that “discussions continue as to how working with Apple could get Sony more involved in the computer field, which will be so important to us in years to come.”

Sony in computers, Intel in video. Clearly, things are moving fast in the information industries--so fast that whether you’re in business as owner, employee or investor, you need to understand what’s happening. The decade promises enormous opportunity but also intense competition--and a challenge to many settled ideas.

First, purely as improved television, HDTV will affect many businesses. The new process is basically a way of bringing more picture information to your screen. The television signal that is transmitted to your set today is reassembled into a picture on a few hundred lines in the TV set screen.

In HDTV, there will be a lot more picture information transmitted, and the signal will be reassembled across more than 1,000 lines of screen. The result will be a TV picture in the home that will be motion picture quality. That improvement alone will make a difference to the movies and to broadcasting and cable.

Second, and more important, HDTV uses so many integrated circuits and so much electronic memory to process information that it turns the TV set into a sort of computer-in-waiting.

And the video processors that Intel and other companies are developing will make it a computer-in-fact, a dynamic rather than a passive medium.

As a spokeswoman for Intel explains interactive video, if you wanted to study earthquakes, you could assemble televised news clips of past earthquakes not merely to look at but to manipulate and do calculations on to learn about seismic forces.

With an interactive telecomputer, as author George Gilder puts it in “Life After Television”: “You could take a fully interactive course in physics with the world’s most exciting professors, who respond to your questions and let you learn at your own speed. You could view the Super Bowl from any point in the stadium, or soar above the basket with Michael Jordan--all on a high-resolution display.”

The possibilities are as endless as the imagination, which is why big companies are trying to acquire storehouses of information such as book publishers and film studios. Sony acquired Columbia Pictures in 1988, and Matsushita is negotiating to buy MCA today, both for their film libraries and for their ability as film studios to make new “software”--as TV shows and films are being called in business these days.

Intel, by contrast, has no intention of buying an entertainment company but instead is encouraging companies here and in Japan to create programs for its video processor system.

The upshot is a very promising decade, as Gerrit Jeelof, chairman of Philips North America, puts it, “for people who are able to make the programs, who have the creativity to design the software and the know-how to use the tools.”

In short, it shapes up as another great decade for the computer business. Which is why Sony is so eager to get into it.

Even if Sony doesn’t move to acquire Apple--which would ignite a political storm--it will surely make a play in computers because it sees the coming convergence of consumer electronics and computing.

Maybe IBM should be trying to buy a movie studio like MCA.