1.2 History


1.2.1 History of Interactivity

A traditional television broadcast is a one-way, passive medium. People gathered around the TV set as they had gathered around the radio, much like their ancestors had gathered around campfire storytellers. Once a person or a family tuned to a specific channel, they were likely to stay tuned to it for a while, sometimes for an entire evening. Advertisers therefore relied on passive advertisements promoting brands rather than specific products.

The concept of viewers interacting with the television was not foreign to broadcast television pioneers. From 1953 to 1957, the CBS television network broadcast the regular children's series, Winky Dink and You , which may have been the first truly interactive TV program [WINKEY-DINK]. The interaction was created through the use of a plastic sheet that was placed on the TV screen, and held in place by static electricity, created by rubbing the screen with a special cloth.

The goal of the game was for the audience children to help the Winky Dink cartoon character overcome challenges it encountered . For example, when Winky Dink was chased by a tiger to the edge of a cliff, the announcer would ask the audience to draw a bridge on the screen allowing Winky Dink to escape the tiger. Children did experience some limited interaction with the content, as their actions would be a direct response to the events in the program. On many occasions, subsequent events on the screen were seemingly produced in response to their actions. Although children were excited by this show, some children used crayons to draw directly on the glass of the TV screen, and parental complaints finally convinced CBS to cancel the series.

Nevertheless, the concept would not die. One key form of interactivity between people is conversation. The potential of such interactivity was demonstrated by Sylvester (Pat) Weaver, who had made broadcast TV history in the 1950s as the head of NBC. He aired The Tonight Show with Steve Allen, and the Today show with Dave Garroway and his sidekick chimp named J. Fred Muggs. These two live talk shows helped make the TV set popular; since then, talk shows have become the "killer app" for television.

After leaving NBC, Pat Weaver went on to launch Subscription Television (STV) in July 1964. The three-channel coaxial cable network in Los Angeles and San Francisco offered an interactive movie channel, cultural events channel, and sports channel, long before HBO, A&E, or ESPN, and long before niche programming was envisioned . A connection fee of $5 was accompanied by a weekly $1 charge. Special programming could be viewed at 50 cents to $2.50 per selection. By November 1964, STV had wired 6,000 homes . Not bad for four months of work.

STV's success threatened to change the industry. Theaters and broadcasters were fierce rivals since television started keeping people home, but with the advent of STV, they faced a common threat. They joined forces to organize a November 1964 ballot initiative to save free TV by outlawing pay TV in California. The referendum passed, but courts eventually ruled the measure was unconstitutional only after STV had exhausted its cash reserves , causing it to fail as well. STV's success did result in a slow change of the entire industry, as it triggered a slow and irreversible transformation toward cable-based TV service, which today is dominated by large Multiple (cable) System Owners (MSO). At age 85, Weaver told Cablevision, "In the market economy, those already in one business and doing it a certain way will fight against anybody who wants to come into their league and be competitive with them. And if they can put them out of business before they start, they will."

The first major iTV service utilizing a cable infrastructure in the United States was Warner Communications' Qube, which began in Columbus, Ohio, in December 1977, and was running until 1984 (before the Mac days!). The Qube system consisted of a Set-top Box with a computer chip and some memory that kept tabs on customer's preferences. Qube offered 30 channels of television (as opposed to the 20 that were standard at the time) divided equally between broadcast, pay-per-view, and original interactive channels. The viewer accessed Qube programming with a proprietary remote control that was connected by wire to the set-top box and used to select channels, order pay-per-view movies, and respond to interactive programming. The buttons to respond to interactive programming could be assigned different meanings for different shows. For example, the buttons could be used to poll the audience, respond to questions on live talk shows, answer questions on a quiz show, play interactive games , or purchase goods and services. Although Qube's innovative programming was quite popular, it was not a sustainable business model because it was shadowed by VCRs, video movies, and video stores which were rapidly becoming popular.

On a different continent , in 1979 the British government offered Teletext, which allowed BBC viewers to trade text messages via the telephone. Teletext used the black Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) between lines of video to transmit data, which was displayed on the screen as a page of text. The UK's Teletext model was adopted by more than a dozen different countries and still survives today.

Subsequently, in the 1980s, TCI and Time Warner experimented with their versions of interactive television on some test markets. Subscribers to their services could shop online, play games with people across town, and do a lot of the things we dreamed interactive TV should offer. Most of the testers found the service very useful. Costs were high and functionality was limited, mainly due to the dependence on a slow external network connection and flooding of servers by simultaneous traffic for each interactive program. As a result, neither TCI nor Time Warner could cover the costs of operating the service while keeping the prices reasonable for the consumer.

In 1994 Time Warner tested a sophisticated and expensive interactive television service in Orlando called the Full Service Network (FSN). FSN offered interactive shopping, games, sports, news, and an electronic program guide, as well as movies on demand. FSN was incredibly complex. File servers stored movies and other content in digital form, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switches were used to transfer the data to a set-top box at a speed of 30 pictures per second. The box itself had five times the computing power of a top-of-the-line PC. Although FSN had tremendous potential, several issues led to its demise. Time Warner attempted to do too much too fast and learned that the complexity of integrating all the services was overwhelming. The reliance on an expensive network infrastructure external to a receiver introduced high overhead and infrastructure expenses that surpassed the market opportunity.

In 2000, several Web TV (now MicrosoftTV) tests were conducted in various locations including Baltimore and San Diego. Viewers were able to select the Education button on the screen and see Web-like text and graphics related to Nova, or select Lifestyle or MotorWeek pages. NewsHour, Zoom, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood , and local productions of Maryland Public Television (PTV) and KPBS were also options in various content categories. These efforts were coordinated with Liberate Technologies of San Carlos, California, a leading designer of software for cable set-top boxes.

Two examples of old interactive TV services that survived for decades are captioning [CAPTIONS] and teletext [TELETEXT]. Both of these services rely on local interactivity and do not rely on any external network infrastructure. The survival of these two services may indicate that a solid business model for iTV may be broadcasting interactivity over the air, utilizing local interactivity, and not using remote interactivity that generates network traffic and relies on cable infrastructure.

1.2.2 History of HDTV Format

Independent of offering interactivity, Digital TV offers new formats. Today, the following message is common:


                   "This  film  has  been  modified
                                   from  its  original  version.
                     It  has  been  formatted  to  fit  your  screen."

When the studio released the home version of movies they had to cut the sides off the images so that it would fit your TV screen. Our televisions use a different aspect ratio than widescreen movies. The aspect ratio of most old TVs is 4:3, which means it's a little wider than it is tall. For every 4 units of width, our television screens stretches out 3 units of height. For example, if the width of the screen is 20 inches, its height is about 15 inches (20:15 or 4:3).

This format was originally developed by W. K. L. Dickson in 1889 while he was working at Thomas Edison's laboratories. Dickson was experimenting with a motion-picture camera called a Kinescope, and he made his film 1 inch wide with frames 3/4 inch high. This film size, and its aspect ratio, became the standard for the film and motion-picture industry because there was no apparent reason to change. In 1941, when the NTSC proposed standards for television broadcasting, they adopted the same ratio as the film industry. It made sense until 50 years ago.

In the 1950s Hollywood wanted to give the public a reason to buy a ticket instead of stay home and watch their sets. They tried a lot of ideas, some good and some bad, but one idea that still works today is the widescreen format. Wider screens, such as Cinerama, Cinemascope, and VistaVision, give the theater audience a more visually engulfing experience. Because our two eyes give us a wider view, a wider movie makes more sense.

This concept was very simple and powerful. Today, the High Definition TV (HDTV) industry is adopting it for the same reason that Hollywood adopted it in the 1950's: encourage the public to upgrade their TV sets. Some believe that the wide format HDTV enhancement is more powerful than the introduction of interactivity into a TV program. However, regardless of the order of importance, there is no doubt that wide screen format combined with the high resolution of HDTV and interactivity, is a winning proposition (see Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3. The format improvement introduced by HDTV.

In 1981, the first American demonstration of HDTV took place at the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) [SMPTE] annual conference in San Francisco. The Japanese broadcasting corporation's (NHK) 1,125-line system drew raves from engineers and filmmakers. CBS assembled components from several companies: NHK provided a camera and monitors manufactured by Ikegami and Matsushita, respectively, and Sony provided digital tape recorders with HDTV capabilities. That year, CBS applied to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for allocation of DBS 12 mhz spectrum for HDTV systems and suggested the development of terrestrial HDTV delivery as well. About the same time, in a Tokyo demonstration, Sony introduced analog tape recorders capable of recording HDTV wide bandwidth, completing the components needed for an analog HDTV system. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) agreed to establish a group to focus on HDTV at its annual executive committee meeting.

The next year, CBS and NHK combined forces to host an HDTV demonstration in Los Angeles. The 30-minute demonstration tape included two 6-minute movies produced at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. That year, CBS and NHK brought their HDTV demonstration to Washington and impressed FCC commissioners.

In 1984, Sony's work on HDTV brought the development of high-resolution slow motion, called Super Slo-Mo, used by ABC in broadcast of the Kentucky Derby. Sony HDTV cameras were made available for purchase at the NAB convention. Further, during that year RCA proposed an HDTV system using the same bandwidth and field rate but 750 lines and a progressive scanning method with 60 complete pictures per second to the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC).

The next year, NHK introduced in Tokyo an HDTV down-converter, which converted 1,125-line, 60-field HDTV signal to 625-line 50-field PAL system. In the SMPTE meeting that year, the NHK and RCA HDTV systems were demonstrated side-by-side. A month later ATSC voted in favor of NHK HDTV standard. This standard was proposed by the U.S. to the International Radio Consultative Committee (CCIR), and in October 1986, a CCIR study group unanimously adopted HDTV standard based on the U.S. proposal: 1,125 lines, 2:1 interlace , 60 fields, 16:9 aspect ratio, 1,920 samples per active line for luminance, and 960 for color difference.

In 1986, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) shot a 13- hour miniseries in HDTV, Chasing Rainbows , which was the world's first major HDTV production, at a cost of $10 million (Canadian dollars). The National Cable Television Association (NCTA) formed a technical group to examine cable transmission of HDTV, and the NAB president announced the formation of the Broadcast Technology Center, a research company devoted to HDTV and funded in part by NAB reserves.

However, in 1987, roadblocks were mounting. The FCC launched an inquiry into HDTV and other Advanced Television (ATV) systems. As a result, it froze all applications for new UHF stations and for reallocation of spectrum for new UHF stations in 30 of the top 34 markets and ordered the formation of a joint FCC industry advisory committee on ATV. About a year later, a blue ribbon panel of the FCC's ATV service advisory committee unanimously approved draft interim report which recommended the adoption of a terrestrial HDTV system as well as the reservation of UHF spectrum for that purpose.

In 1989, the U.S. House and Senate convened hearings on HDTV and bills were introduced in both chambers that would stimulate the growth of a U.S. HDTV industry. The American Electronics Association released a five-year business plan calling for the federal government to spend up to $1.35 billion in grants, loans, and guarantees to insure the development of HDTV through an industry government consortium.

That year, Southern Bell Telephone Corporation (SBTC) announced participation in the first use of satellite delivered HDTV signals for commercial purposes and the first HDTV transmission over fiber- optic cable. The next year, General Instrument (GI) presented DigiCipher, an all digital HDTV broadcast system with conditional access.

Subsequently, the 1990s witnessed a rapid development of HDTV technologies. By 1995, GI had become the major provider of cable set-top boxes, having only one major competitor, Scientific Atlanta (SA).



ITV Handbook. Technologies and Standards
ITV Handbook: Technologies and Standards
ISBN: 0131003127
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 170

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