Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 14, 1993 TAG: 9302140151
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
RIVAL GROUPS MIGHT UNITE TO BUILD NEW TV SYSTEM
A MERGER of corporate teams could smooth the introduction of theater-quality television technology to American homes.
Three rival groups that have proposed high-definition television systems for general use in the United States are engaged in intense discussions about merging into a single team, according to industry executives.
"There are talks, but no one's agreed to anything," said Joseph Donahue, senior vice president at Thomson Consumer Electronics Corp., which is a member of one of the groups made up of companies and researchers.
A merger could speed the introduction of the new HDTV technology because technical resources could be combined and there would be no losers to tie things up in court for years with legal challenges.
Discussions heated up Friday after an industry panel concluded late Thursday that 18 months of tests had shown none of the TV systems, each of which delivers theater-quality pictures and sound, to be clearly superior to the others.
The Federal Communications Commission plans to designate one system for use in this country. The developer of the selected system stands to collect years of royalties as it licenses the technology to TV makers around the world.
The three groups are: AT&T and Zenith Electronics Corp.; General Instrument Corp. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which proposed two separate systems; and a consortium consisting of NBC, the David Sarnoff Research Center, Thomson Consumer Electronics and North American Philips Corp.
The advisory panel found that each of the prototypes had some major deficiency. The group recommended that the three teams be asked to submit improved systems for additional testing.
The panel also recommended dropping from consideration a fourth contender, the Japanese TV network NHK. Its was the only system that did not employ the digital technology of computers, a feature that the FCC has made clear it wants in the U.S. version of HDTV.
The three teams have talked off and on of merging and each is a combination of earlier rivals.
Last summer, the AT&T/Zenith and General Instrument/MIT groups took out a sort of insurance policy, agreeing to split the royalties if either won.
Their engineers continued to work on their systems independently, however.
Talks in progress appear to focus on all sides crafting a single system. That would replicate what happened a half-century ago, when the U.S. electronics industry jointly developed the basic technology found in today's television sets.