The War For Eyeballs: Communiques From The Front
Roger B. Wyatt
Communique 2: The Other Pincer: Information Appliances

If DVDs are one pincer in the Consumer Electronics counter-attack, then Information Appliances are the other. Techno-blitzkrieg. So what are Information Appliances? They are low cost, but limited purpose digital devices for the mass market. WebTV is a good example. It's a $225 set-top box that attachs to a tv for surfing the Web and sending and receiving email, all with a remote control. Computing lite, one might say.

Information Appliances are a response to a reality gap in computer industry rhetoric. Theoretically computers are universal machines. It is true that few if any limits have been discovered regarding applications of computing technology. However not in the same machine. With 15 IRQ limits in a PC (and yes I do know about plug and pray), a maximum of 7 SCSI devices, only 4 with EIDE, along with various software conflicts, memory limitations, digital imperialism, and a host of other limits, the individual computer achieves an optimal level of complexity well below universal. Modern PCs are complex, often more so than non-specialists can cope with. Those guys with timers blinking 12:00 on their vcrs are the people who Wintel wants to sell their television replacement stuff to. But the Eyeball War is a contest for domination of a mass market, not for the ninjatek elite. I'm not sure Bill and Andy get that. Unfortunately, the simplest machines to configure, like the Amiga, have been almost killed off in the platform wars. Hence the rhetoric gap.

Like Scud hunting Special Forces in the Iraqi desert, Information Appliances are a consumer electronics raid through this reality gap into the heartland of the computer industry. For example, by offering a telephone that can send and receive email, surf the web, and make calls of course, consumer electronics takes a chunk out of the universal capabilities of a computer, repackages it, and offers a $150 to $500 product that is simple, fast, and works. Note that email is by far and away the most popular application of the Internet. CIDCO, Uniden, and others were showing exactly this type of info appliance. If I were Andrew Grove, I would be careful who I declared war on. Who knows what else will get sniped off by an info appliance.

"Do you want to upgrade that bag to a box?" Words spoken by a young woman passing out IBM boxes at their booth. Hearing this, I knew I was at a high tech event.

A Digital Camcorder:

I had heard about it. Now I was seeing it. The Hitachi MP-EG1A is a Mpeg camcorder with hard drive recording. It records 20 minutes of Mpeg 1 video with mono sound at 30 frames per second on to a 260 meg PC Card hard drive inserted in the camera. The image size is the MPEG 1 Standard, 352 pixels by 240 pixels. That same hard drive card can store 3,000 jpeg still images, or 4 hours of Mpeg audio, or 1,000 jpeg stills with each image having a 10 second audio clip attached. So with 5 PC Cards, about the size of credit cards, one could record an hour of moving images on three of them, 3,000 stills on another one of them, and 4 hours of audio on the remaining one. It's a bit pricey at $2,500 list for the recorder, but in time the price will drop. They always do. Moore's Law, you know. Mpeg editing software from FutureTel is bundled with the package. It's available in the US, and perhaps elsewhere, now. Watch the Tech Head pages for a detailed review of the recorder.

This is big news for the Digital Cinema maker. A low cost all digital non-tape system is here. It is possible to create a project that never becomes analog at any stage. No degradation anywhere. Faster post-production with no digitizing. Mpeg is already digital in the first place. Record in Mpeg, edit on a computer with non-linear editing software, distribute on the Web or on CD. Hello desktop drive-in. This would be a true all digital Cinema production system. To see this at a consumer electronics show, is amazing. It is just the beginning. Yes, of course Firewire and DV digital tape format is here. But one still has to dub (transfer) imagery from the tape through Firewire and on to the hard drive in real-time, not faster. With mpeg-1 on a PC Card, take the card out of the Hitachi and slip it in to a PC Card reader in the computer. That's it. When you open Premiere or whatever non-linear editor you are using, the PC Card is just another hard drive with Mpeg files on it. Load them and start editing.

With this system one could begin editing on a laptop, they all read PC Cards, in the back seat of the car while driving back from the shoot. One might start looking forward to traffic jams. They would allow a bit more time for one more edit that way.

HDTV Learns To Dance:

While DVD was the big story coming out of the show, a bigger story was lurking in the shadows beyond the hype. HDTV. Tucked away in a corner of the schedule was an HDTV Panel. Gary Shapiro, President of CEMA (Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association) had organized a distinguished panel on the topic wither HDTV. Also on the panel were: Blair Levin, Chief of Staff to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, David Sidal, legal advisor for FCC Commissioner Susan Ness, Joel Brinkley, author of Defining Vision: An Account of the Race For HDTV and political editor now turned spectrum policy guru for the New York Times, and Bruce Allen, Senior Vice President for Technology and Business Development at Thompson Multimedia. Their presentation was a heads-up call to the consumer electronics industry. HDTV is real, locked on and closing fast.

All dressed up and nowhere to go. Like some geek at the dance, HDTV has been talked about, but never out on the dance floor for well over a decade and a half. It became a bore after years of seeing no red smearing on the Buckingham Palace guards coats in HDTV demo tapes at the Grand Alliance booth. It seemed that high definition video was doomed to be a techno-curiosity with no application. But they must gotten a hold of Betty Lou's shoes and taken lessons from Michael Jackson because all of a sudden things were happening. Weeks before I had read about the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) declaring acceptance of the Grand Alliance HDTV digital television specification as the future television standard of the United States. They did this on 26 Dec 1996. Now we're moonwalking.

Key points in the presentation were:

Gary Shapiro announced that "free over-the-air broadcast television will now be allowed to compete on a level digital playing field." If they can get it together, I might add.

The United States has the most flexible digital system in the world. It could be a global system.

But it was hell to get there. The Grand Alliance negioations and the later ones with the computer industry make the American and Vietnamese negioations over the shape of the negioating table seem like polite discussion at the faculty club.

If you want to understand where HDTV came from, Joel Brinkley's book, Defining Vision: An Account of the Race For HDTV is a very good place to start. This excellent book clearly examines the long and winding road to the digital standard. The HDTV story is a case study in the intertwining of politics, economics, and technology in the formation of technical policy and its social consequences.

HDTV is an international economic issue. Jobs and profits are in the crosshairs. HDTV will be manufactured in the US. Digital set manufacture, so far, is done only by Thompson and Phillips, and it is already being done in US. Another step in the digital economy.

Bruce Allen of Thompson, had some interesting observations on set production. 20% of the cost of manufacture is taken out in every model cycle in the TV set industry. That's with an analog technology. With Moore's Law at work in HDTV set production, they will be blue light specials at Wal-mart before you know it. Gonna get me one of those suckers.

It makes one wonder whether the economists are ever going to make a conceptual transition from an industrial economy of limits to an information economy of abundance. It's just a thought.

These tvs are smart. They are customized, scalable, and interactive. If someone in the future developed a 3D stereo vision capability, it could be a card that pops into the HDTV set. However if I don't have a 3D card in my set, my set will ignore that part of the signal and only decode those elements it is capable of playing. For a preliminary understanding think of black and white sets in a color world. You could receive the program but not in color. These tvs decode signals in both the progressive and interlace scan formats. Progressive scan is what computer monitors use, while interlace is what televisions use. Two happy industries, ready to hammer the other. Is this like DVD, another marriage of convenience between the television industries and the computer industry?

There will be an official transition date, as we will see, set by the FCC for 2006. After that date the FCC will compel the broadcasters to go dark if they don't transfer. Probably right in the middle of revealing the identity of the One Armed Man. So easy to say, transition. I have a feeling that when the time comes it may not be a cakewalk.

In the Eyeball War, HDTV raises the ante by providing first, a better television than anyone has ever seen and second, makes it a scalable and interactive viewing experience. Incidentally, it provides a 280 million TV set replacement market in the US alone. Remember those jobs and profits I was writing about? The HDTV revenues will make quite a war chest for the conflict. Thus DVD, HDTV, and Information Appliances are the heavy divisions in the Consumer Electronics forces. Cash rich companies have a lot of freedom of action in an Eyeball War.

The barrage of concepts that the panel was tossing around was as heavy as ack ack over Baghdad on the first night of Desert Storm. I think the panel had greater accuracy though. Movement towards spectrum flexibility. Use variation by users of spectrum rather than specification. An example of emergent system thinking. Packet identification extensibility. Additional services. This was a jargon barrage.

Digital television is a frontier. Unknown. Stormfront closing. Next