NAB2004 Special: Reports From the National Association of Broadcasters Show April 17-22, 2004 - Las Vegas, Nevada

By Eric Taub

The purpose of trade shows is to present the future of an industry, not its present. And based on what’s on display at this week’s National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, it won’t be long before the entire nation will own a flat-panel digital television, and every station will have digitized their entire workflow, from capture to transmission. Soon, even the news will be presented in HDTV.

"We’re at a tipping point in the transition to digital and HDTV," said John Taylor, vice president for public affairs and communications for LG Electronics. Supporting his belief, sales of HDTV and HDTV-ready sets have more than doubled for the first two months of 2004 compared to the same period last year, according to figures released this week by the Consumer Electronics Association.

Yet unlike the now-dormant 50-year old NTSC color transmission standard, digital’s ATSC system continues to improve. One complaint being addressed is the difficulty some have in even receiving the signal. If you live too far from the transmitter, watching a digital channel is often hit or miss. And with the continued growth of the nation’s outlying suburbs, even more people will suffer from DTV reception problems.

Part of the problem is financial. To save money, some local broadcasters send out their digital signals at less than full-power. However, according to FCC rules, all must increase their feed to full signal strength by 2005.

For those who still have trouble receiving a stable digital feed, help may be at hand. LG Electronics has proposed a modification to the current 8-VSB transmission standard that could eliminate the occasional pixilation and picture freezes that now plague reception in fringe areas.

Called Enhanced VSB, the system would use a chunk of the digital bitstream currently reserved for data transmission to create a fallback audio and video stream. Simply put, when conditions prevented the full HDTV stream from being displayed without breakup, the picture would automatically cut back to a lower-quality version. The viewer would experience a seamless decrease in picture sharpness, which, depending on the size of the monitor and the viewing distance, might be imperceptible.

This enhanced standard, backwards-compatible with existing digital set top boxes, has been sent to the ATSC, which will submit its recommendations over the next several months. Regardless of how far a consumer lives from the transmitter, ATSC technical improvements will eventually enable "everyone to receive over the air digital transmissions with just an indoor antenna," LG’s Taylor said.