Once the decision was made to change to high definition broadcasting(necessitating people to ultimately chucking out their old sets anyway), why didn’t they pick a PAL HD format?
PAL has always been touted as a better standard than NTSC.
Here was the chance to do something right, and it didn’t happen.
There doesn’t seem to be any excuse similar to when color replaced b&w and there was a mandate to keep the two compatible.
Anyone know anything about this?
PAL is an analog television broadcasting system, like NTSC. It is being replaced by DVB in Europe. It will soon be pinin’ for the fjords.
DVB huh?
Damn that’s even more annoying. The two parties should have joined forces to hammer out one fine “united” HD system.
Pining for the fjords? What kind of talk is that? And why did my TV fall flat on its back the moment I got it home?
PAL is the old european standard for color TV. It was developed because the Germans did not want to adopt the French SECAM system (SECAM was the old CBS standard developed in the USA, which the French adopted in an electronic format).
PAL has/had anumber of problems:
-the dreadful 50 HZ frame rate…the flicker is very noticeable
-in broadcast systems, the 1200 line standatd was never achieved…you got (at best) about 850 lines
The all-digital standard is much better. Now, if we couldIMPROVE what is actually broadcast, we might get somewhere. I don’t see the advantage of watching "BuffY’ in hi=definition!
I’m throwing a flag on that one.
Well, then, you can just go ahead and pluck your eyes out, blasphemer.
No advantage, indeed. I can think of few things more worthy of hi-def treatment than Willow and Tara…
There is no PAL HD format. PAL and NTSC are analog broadcast formats, HD is by definition a digital format. The new terrestrial broadcast digital format in the USA is ATSC, which supports all sorts of formats - 480i (current NTSC), and HD: 480p, 720p, 1080i.
Any type of HD is inherently better than PAL or NTSC. A better question might be “why didn’t the Europeans and North American engineers agree on the same digital broadcast format?” I don’t have an answer to that, except that it took a long time just for the USA engineers to agree - if the engineers on both sides of the Atlantic had to agree on a standard, they’d still be arguing.
And you won’t have to throw out your NTSC TV in 2008. The ruling doesn’t apply to cable at all, so if you have cable it’ll be up to your cable company. If you are getting all your TV off the air, you’ll be able to buy a converter box (similar to a digital cable box) which will receive broadcast ATSC signals and convert them to NTSC for your TV. Of course, you won’t be able to see the HD channels in all their full glory. Whether or not these boxes will be penguin shaped has not yet been determined.
The problem is that it was shot on film and then digitized for adding special effects and other post-production stuff. So you could end up with some of it in HD and some of it in SD.
Well you’ve actually phrased my question the way I intended - why not a common HD standard worldwide.
I’m sure a converter could be created to convert any HD standard to NTSC (god know how many people will cling to their antiques over the next 10 years).
It’s like I said, “they had the chance to do something right, and f**ked it up”.
Unless the quality of the programming improves drastically along with the transmission technology, my guess is: many, many, many, many people. I know that I’m not going to spend $5000 so I can watch Survivor: Boise or CSI: Topeka"
I read that they are already testing some like that, but they keep exploding.
Ah, but watching CSI (Las Vegas) in high definition is another story. It’s worth it for those few seconds of overhead back-from-commercial shots alone; breathtaking in high definition. And the obligatory gore shots are just incredible.
Not the ones that have “Property of the zoo” stamped on them.
While on the face of it one would think a worldwide broadcast standard would make sense in practice it was pretty much never going to happen.
Remember there are very powerful companies involved with all of this who each had their own agenda. Each of those companies spend a lot of money in their respective countries lobbying to gain advantage and swing the final decision in their favor (and the governments also wanted to have their industries gain advantage over other countries). Note this is not just television manufacturers but also broadcasters. You can even divide the broadcasters into satellite, cable and over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting and in addition to just wanting to make more money each of those broadcast methods have inherent issues making certain types HDTV formats more favorable (which did not necessarily translate to the other methods who wanted a different way). No consider each country tended to be more, say, cable than another who was more OTA. Now add whether you want backwards compatibility to the old standard. In the end it is a wonder anything happened at all.
The history of HDTV development can actually be traced all the way back to 1968! Back then Japan wanted to develop a new TV standard and was looking at 1125 line standard (although I do not think it was an HDTV standard as we think of it). Japan actually was starting design on HDTV standards in 1979 though (first to really go there). Their first system started broadcasting in 1990 and was actually an analog HDTV system (MUSE). It was not very good though (technical reasons again) and Japan has since gone to an all digital HDTV format.
The EU (or what becmae the EU anyway…EEC back then) initially developed HD-MAC standard but for various technical reasons it could only be used by cable and satellite providers and it was not compatible with PAL/SECAM systems so a buyer of a set had one or the other but not both. HD-MAC ultimately failed and they then went with DVB but understand that the EU has taken more of an approach of broadcasting more channels as SDTV than fewer channels as HDTV (IIRC one HDTV signal can run 4 SDTV channels in bandwidth). They get some HDTV but not the notion we have in the US that everything should be all HDTV someday. I think (not sure) the Europeans are also toying with EDTV which is sort of a middle ground between HDTV and SDTV.
In the US you had multiple companies proposing an HDTV standard around the late 80’s. They eventually had well over 23 proposals…each different and all analog. The FCC then said it wanted an all HDTV format and not EDTV or something lesser. New proposals were submitted and it came down to four companies (AT&T, MIT, Zenith and I forget who the fourth was). Thing was the FCC couldn’t decide so it told those four to go play nice together and hammer out a standard between them presumably taking the best from each proposal and ultimately we got what you see today and even that is still weird. IIRC the current HDTV “standard” actually encompasses much mroe than you think looking at an HDTV. Not sure how to make sense of it all but here is a link you can look at it if you are of a mind to. ATSC Guide to DTV Standards
It may be worth noting that awhile back the US gave (rather than auctioned off) valuable bandwidth to broadcasters so they could have more bandwidth to transmit an HDTV signal. Broadcasters quickly decided that 4 regular channels equaled 4x the ad revenue than just one HDTV broadcast (they can;t really charge any mroe money for an ad on HDTV). Congress got miffed and called in broacast executives to testify because the bandwidth was supposed tp be used for HDTV. Broadcast execs swore on a stack of bibles that they always meant to broadcast in HD…never fear.
Anyway, this hardly does it all justice and is a long way from complete and I may well have remember parts wrong but I think at least broadly it covers it and most importantly begins to scratch the surface of how labyrinthine the road to HDTV has been. Doubtless whole books could be written exploring the in-fighting on multiple levels that went on here.
I’d highly recommend Defining Vision: How Broadcasters Lured the Government into Inciting a Revolution in Television, Updated and Expanded by Joel Brinkley.