Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 26, 1993 TAG: 9305260089
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: From The Associated Press, and The Washington Post
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
\ An agreement by three major electronics groups to cooperate rather than compete on developing digital high-definition television could clear the way for broadcasts of razor-sharp pictures and compact-disc-quality sound to TV sets by the second half of the decade.
The announcement of the so-called "grand alliance" of the former competitors signaled the end of a rivalry that threatened to delay introduction of HDTV and broke a deadlock in federal selection of a U.S. version of the technology.
The three groups said Monday they had joined and will design a single system for the United States. That system could be ready for Federal Communications Commission approval some time next year.
But mass adoption of HDTV will depend on the companies successfully building a prototype of the system that they propose. And Americans must be sufficiently impressed with HDTV to spend several thousand dollars to buy the special sets they will need.
Nonetheless, the announcement smooths the way for the FCC, which wants to phase in HDTV and eventually eliminate the system in use now.
Someday in the next century, today's TV sets will be outmoded - unable to receive HDTV broadcasts. But that likely won't occur until the price of HDTV sets is low enough to make the transition relatively painless for the majority of Americans.
And it's not likely to lead to a major trash heap of TV sets. Consumers have made such an investment in video tapes that their old sets are likely to be used for decades to play home videos and video movies.
Conventional TV transmits pictures as variations in radio waves. Digital TV, in contrast, sends out high-speed bursts of radio pulses that represent the ones and zeros of computer language.
HDTV would be the world's first digital television, using the underlying technology of computers. With it, U.S. electronics firms hope to take the lead in an emerging global industry that now is dominated by Japan.
The groups in the alliance, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Instrument Corp. working together; a cooperative venture by AT&T and Zenith Electronics Corp.; and a consortium of NBC, the David Sarnoff Research Center and the U.S. subsidiaries of France's Thomson SA and the Netherlands' Electronics NV, had each developed different systems that emerged from an initial field of 23 competitors in the HDTV sweepstakes.
With the agreement, Joseph Donahue, senior vice president at alliance member Thomson Consumer Electronics Inc., suggested HDTV might even be available in time for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
Many experts believe that HDTV will figure prominently in a coming merger of television and computing. It would be the home terminal for movies, computing, on-line electronics services and education, they said.
The technology became a new front of global competition in the late 1980s, as Japan prepared to put in place the world's first HDTV system. Fearful it was laying the groundwork to dominate a mammoth new field of electronics, Congress and the FCC called on engineers in the United States to get to work.
The eventual shift to HDTV will be a tremendous challenge to the nation's approximately 1,500 broadcast television stations, which must replace all of their transmitting equipment in order to broadcast digitally - an investment estimated at $12 million to $15 million for each station.
Officials estimate this could take 15 years or more.
by CNB