This is the seventh installment of Philip J Cianci’s book “High Definition Television – The Creation, Development and Implementation of HDTV Technology”. This book provides a comprehensive look at how we got to where we are today with HDTV. Starting back in the mid 60’s in Japan through the Grand Alliance to today’s global deployment of HDTV, you get an inside view of what went on.
It’s a fascinating story that’s well told.
Phil has made arrangements for TheOnLineEngineer to publish excerpts from his book over the next several weeks. This is the excerpt from Chapter 7.
The book is available from Amazon and a list of links to international booksellers can found on Phil’s website – www.HDTVarchiveproject.com.
Chapter 7
“For the Greater Good”
From its analog birth, formative years and higher education in Japan, through its postgraduate European tour, to digital adulthood in the Land of Capitalist Opportunity, the United States, HDTV had now reached technical maturity. But it was a contentious journey and not all parties were satisfied with the specified final destination. As the U.S. television industry and interested parties awaited FCC adoption of the ATSC DTV Terrestrial Transmission standard, America’s last domestically owned television manufacturer, Zenith, even with the prospect of revenue from 8-VSB patent licensing, was unable to recover from its financial woes. In November, a controlling interest in the company was acquired by South Korea’s LG Electronics (Lowe). America’s once-mighty television receiver manufacturing empire was now under the control of foreign multinational business entities.
SMPTE standards are reviewed every five years and 240M was revisited and modified to include the 59.94 Hz frame rate in addition to the original 60 Hz. After a public review period, SMPTE 240M attained ANSI approval without objection on December 1. SMPTE’s efforts at documenting a family of HDTV standards finally came full circle when ABC’s Bill Miller and Panasonic’s Jukka Hamalainen and others completed a document specifying a 1280 x 720 progressive scanning format that used ITU-R BT.709 colorimetry; the document was subsequently issued as SMPTE 296M-1995. Reflecting the addition of non–HD video formats, a revised ATSC A/53 Digital Television Standard was issued on December 20; 1080p60 was deleted in the process.
Events and topics discussed in this chapter include:
- A spatial and temporal scalable ATV system
- FCC Comments, computer Industry objections, Film Industry objections
- WRAL or WHD – Which station did the first ATSC broadcast?
- The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers adopts a DTV standard
- Progressive scanning and the emergence of 720p
- A DTV Transmission Standard Christmas present
and more…
From High Definition Television: The Creation, Development and Implementation of HDTV Technology © 2012 Philip J. Cianci by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandpub.com.
Chapter 6 ———– Chapter 8
Electronic Design has a nice two part (so far) tutorial on 
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