DigiCipher’s HDTV Technology May Set Industry Standard : Breakthrough: Firm has developed two of the five competing systems for a new generation of high-definition televisions.
High-definition television is rapidly evolving from concept to reality, and General Instrument’s San Diego-based DigiCipher operation hopes to play a central role in the process.
DigiCipher has developed two of the five competing technologies from which the U.S. Federal Communications Commission will select a standard in February, 1993. The other three are being pushed by NHK of Japan; a joint venture of AT&T; and Zenith and a consortium of European companies including Phillips and Thomsen, which owns RCA.
The standard that the FCC selects will be the cornerstone for the new generation of higher resolution televisions that could become operational as early as 1995. High-definition TV has sharper, clearer images because HDTV screens have 1,050 lines, twice the 525 lines now on conventional television screens.
The sets will also be built with a wide-screen format to better accommodate movies and live sports coverage. They will also incorporate digital audio technology.
If DigiCipher were to win the HDTV technology horse race, the company would then license its technology to television
manufacturers worldwide that make units for the U.S. market. Except for broadcast encoders, the black boxes that process and compress video images into digital data streams for transmission over broadcast channels, DigiCipher has no plans to build HDTV hardware on its own.
On Wednesday, DigiCipher will ship a system demonstrating the second of its two proposed HDTV approaches to an FCC-designated test lab in Alexandria, Va. The digital-based technology is the last of five HDTV technologies that the FCC is having independently tested before making its selection.
The strong entries put forward by DigiCipher are astounding in light of the fact that the company just barely made the entry deadline for FCC consideration in 1990.
Moreover, DigiCipher developed the technology with relatively few resources: a handful of digital computer scientists led by Woo Paik working out of General Instrument’s VideoCipher offices in San Diego, and research funds that are on the “low end” of the “$10 million to $1-billion” range that its competitors have spent, said Robert M. Rast, DigiCipher’s head of HDTV development.
Nevertheless, an American entry has a real chance of setting the standard for HDTV technology only a few years after the Japanese seemed a cinch to dictate what HDTV technology would be, said Clark Johnson, vice president and commercial electronics analyst with NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y.-based market research firm that specializes in retailing.
The U.S. entries are favored because, apart from technology, “there is a lot of politics in this decision, and to the extent to which political considerations are involved, I would say the American firms probably have a leg up,” Johnson said.
Rast acknowledged that there is strong political pressure on the FCC to select a U.S.-produced HDTV technology.
Ironically, the adoption of such a HDTV technology is unlikely to result in the rebirth of the domestic television industry, Rast said. Zenith is now the only U.S.-owned television manufacturer remaining, and Zenith makes its sets in Mexico.
DigiCipher is part of VideoCipher, the General Instrument division that developed the digital scrambling technology used by nearly all cable TV programming companies to keep satellite dish owners from receiving programs without paying for it.
The desire to protect that market is what propelled Woo Paik and others at VideoCipher to research HDTV. DigiCipher is developing its HDTV technology in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rast said that the FCC’s plans call for HDTV broadcasting to begin in 1995. To avail themselves of the technology, consumers will have to buy new televisions that are expected to cost $5,000 initially and buy new videocassette recorders, which he said will cost about the same as “high end” VCRs that are available now.
For the first 15 years of HDTV, consumers with conventional sets would still be able to use their current hardware because programmers will be required to “simulcast,” or simultaneously broadcast programming that is compatible over conventional as well as high-definition TVs. But consumers will have to buy HDTV sets by the year 2010, the year that the FCC plans to require that stations broadcast in HDTV only.
At a demonstration of its HDTV technology Monday morning, the clarity of DigiCipher’s HDTV images indeed lived up to their billing as nearly equal to those projected in movie theaters.
That kind of discernible, irresistible improvement in image quality will be necessary, Johnson of NPD Group said, if consumers are to make the large investments that the new sets will entail.
“As a consumer, I would be hard pressed to spend a lot more money on a barely perceptible improvement in picture quality. I would have to be convinced that digital processing gives me that much extra that I would want to make that commitment,” Johnson said.
HDTV will also have to offer ancillary benefits, Johnson said.
“Compact disk audio become popular not only because the sound was better but because storage of CDs was easier and sound didn’t have the pops and clicks you get on old records. So, there were other consumer benefits. I think we’re going to have to see those in HDTV for the market to take off,” Johnson said.
DigiCipher is the descendant of Linkabit, the digital communications company founded in San Diego by Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi in 1968 to provide secure data communications services for military uses.
