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Making a Deal with HDTV

High-definition television (or HDTV) is considered to be the greatest development in television technology since color television was introduced to the viewing public in the 1950s. HDTV has over six times the sharpness and clarity of images as compared to the standard definition images. This includes the color resolution (resolution being defined as the measure of an image's clarity related to the amount of image information in the television's signal) and is considered to be more than twice that of the television's conventional standards. The width to height ratio of HDTV is much different than that of a regular set. According to the standards of the conventional television system, the width of the picture is divided by the height giving it a ratio of 4:3. HDTV is more advanced with a ratio of 16:9 thus giving it more movie theater style and viewing power.

But that's not all. The good points of HDTV are many. Let us continue to look at some more.

HDTV has many advantages over standard cable television. They are very simply, better picture quality, better signal quality and greatly improved audio quality. HDTV can be received at 1920x1080 NTSC as compared to regular cable television, which is received at 640x480 pixels. The signal for HDTV is digitally transmitted which helps to rid us of many of the problems that are associated with receiving television signals in an analog manner such as double images (also called ghosting or multi-path), picture sparkles (impulse noise) and weak signals (or snow). Incidentally we have been tuning into television programming in an analog sense for over a sixty-year span of time. With the abilities it has, making a deal with HDTV is not really as difficult as it might at first appear.

Let's take a closer look at its beginnings.

HDTV made its first appearance at the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers (SMPTE) annual conference held in San Francisco in 1981. In 1992 the Federal Communications Commission (abbreviated to FCC) informed the television industry that it was mandating it to begin broadcasting HDTV by 1998. This has indeed taken place as HDTV for all intents and purposes is now broadcast on many channels both throughout the United States as well as Canada. It has been a gradual but albeit successful move although the movie business is catching on to this new trend at a much slower rate. As of the year 2002, the DVDs the viewing public is watching have a resolution of 720x480, which still lags behind television broadcasting tremendously.

So why is the movie industry not as willing to jump on the HDTV bandwagon and seal the deal? The two reasons are Media and Content Protection (also referred to as Copy Protection). Let's delve deeper into these movie concerns.

To look first at the Media issue, a compressed DVD video takes up approximately 3.7-4.7 Mb/s and a double layer DVD holds about 7.95 GB. What this amounts to is about 3.8-5 hours of video to be available on a Dual Layer DVD. New DVDs on the market, called Super-bit DVDs require a smaller amount of compression and remain close to the maximum of 7 Mb/s. This means that these DVDs get about two hours of viewing time. HDTV requires approximately 20 Mb/s to 24 Mb/s compressed (broadcast quality). Therefore with this in mind, a two-hour video needs disc space over the amount of 20 GB. The DVD format is only able to sustain a transfer rate of 9 Mb/s. This means that it is not an easy feat to place even a small amount of HDTV content on a DVD.

Content Protection (or Copy Protection) is a hot issue in the moviemaking business. Movies that are available in a digital format can be copied very easily and moviemakers don’t relish the thought of this unfortunate occurrence taking place whatsoever. If it does then a great deal of money can be lost in the process so taking steps to prevent it from happening is in their best interests.

It is for both of the above reasons (Media and Copy Protection issues) that moviemakers hesitate while those in the television business bravely make deals with HDTV all of the time. But the move towards HDTV in the movie business has been predicted and will eventually become a reality. Once all of the drawbacks can be put to rest and the benefits of HDTV highlighted, our nations' moviemakers will likely choose to embrace all that HDTV has to offer. In the meantime we still have HDTV broadcasts to be seen on our television sets.

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