Well, as someone working in the field at the time, I think I can say
with a fair certainty that in fact the move to digital came as quite a
surprise to all the major players. There were very good reasons to
believe that a digital system would not be possible with a reasonable
bandwidth. Remember that the FCC in the US basically ended all analog
trials at the time that the announcement of a functional digital system
was made - certainly all the players participating in those trials were
expecting an analog system.
The MUSE system was specifically designed for maximum international
compatibility. In fact, it would have been higher quality had they not
chosen to limit the bandwidth to that of the satellites available over
the US, which had the narrowest bandwidth available at the time. The
major reason that this system was not introduced in the US was the
introduction of Japanese style structural impediments to the
importation by the FCC. If the FCC had chosen on the basis of best
available standard, then NHK MUSE would have been selected for the
Advanced Television System well before the digital system was
developed.
Perhaps 15 years seems like a long time, but in the context of this
type of standard, it is not. Remember that the basic color television
standards were developed ten years before large scale introduction of
color systems, and this was for what was at the time a very minor and
entirely backwards compatible change to the broadcast system.
The idea that an interim analog system would be introduced just to add
an additional upgrade cycle is ludicrous at best. The economics of this
scale change over make it clear that it would never be feasible for
either equipment manufacturers or for broadcast studios to make two
rapid changes to their entire equipment inventory.
Eric
On Feb 19, 2004, at 1:30 PM, Ken Chang wrote:
> regarding the development of Muse, it was based on an idea that I'd
> call it "people make mistakes because they can think".
>
> Japanese knew long time ago that digital is the future and what they
> were doing would be useless other than research and accumulation of
> technology (analog ones, CRT ones, ...)
>
> but then they thought: if we can provide it before the digital TV,
> then we should be able to persuade people buy more TVs by inserting
> a new cycle.
>
> I think Japanese had enough time before digital HDTV, but still they
> failed. I think when people have more bandwidth, they will want more
> channels than resolution.
>
> the HNK bs-hi channel is beautiful and boring.
>
Received on Sat Feb 21 08:34:26 2004