ENVISIONEERING -- Informed Intelligence for Decision Makers FEB 4, 1997   In This Issue After the FCC's DTV decision, the industry has a lot of thinking to do Broadband will be a long time in coming to the mass market Is MCI's new VAULT network setting the tone for Internet service? NIST technique helps out on flat-panel display measurements Lucent Technologies readies 56 kbit modem sensing protocol proposal As if you didn't have enough, now here comes video-mail. Thank Intel In Our Opinion... What price the Net? Eyeing Congress? Judging the DTV audience By RICHARD DOHERTY The ink is hardly dry on the Federal Communications Commission's digital TV decision, but the next hard question is already out there: just what do equipment makers, artists and broadcasters have to do to capitalize on the DTV era? It's not as easy a question as you might think. The growth of digital TV will depend on audience, and then on audience, and then on audience again. However, the population of advanced DTV receivers in the U.S. is currently zero. So the first thing is to try and determine just what the potential audience for DTV services is. Questions also abound on how to prepare for a potentially rich, diverse audience of NTSC receivers, set top HD/SD down converters and new 16:9 capable dedicated HDTV receivers. For example, will there be NTSC down conversion from HD and SD sources? Will there be up conversion of SD to HDTV? Or down conversion for HDTV to SD? To listen to TV manufacturers, the average consumer will simply be compelled to whip out a credit card and ante up for a brand new 16:9 large screen CRT TV set. But, with between one and two million home video theaters in use in the U.S., it's reasonable to project a slow migration of new projection systems, and line-doubled (and line quadrupled) systems to shift to HDTV over the next decade. But hardly all at once. And it will happen at such a slow pace that HDTV and SDTV broadcasters are likely to not care. Envisioneering research shows that HDTV and SDTV set top converters will be popular for years to come. These devices will be able to accept broadcast, cable and DBS satellite signals which will decode them (in the users choice of 16:9 or 4:3 format) on the owners' existing large screen TVs. Consider that today's TV sets over 27 inches feature at least a S-video (separate luminance and chrominance) input, which give up to 500 lines of image, well above the 330 lines delivered by NTSC. However, for two million projection TV home theater owners, many sets are capable of more than 800 lines of resolution. That will get these TVs into HDTV Grand Alliance MPEG 2 turf with just an up front S-video or R-G-B component video output set top. With MPEG 2 at the core of the FCC HDTV standard, how long will it be before combination DVD and MPEG 2 SDTV/HDTV receivers bow? After all, why duplicate equipment? And then there's the question of HDTV and SDTV cameras. HDTV cameras are very expensive. And, although Polaroid has shown a progressive scan CCD imager prototype, the days of BetaCam style economical image gathering for sports or news seem years away. Local cameras need not necessarily be HDTV. Consider the effect of using cameras with, say, 500-line NTSC resolution feeding a Faroudja processor, producing a re-scaled image capture area with an appropriately higher apparent resolution. The safe area and resolution limits for high resolution TV production will evolve just as color TV production (and commercials) tracked color TV audiences thirty years ago. To SMPTE members, this is a daunting challenge. To broadcasters, the economics of reaching an audience - or even worse, not being able to reach it whilst your competition can - is paramount. Envisioneering will be publishing a regular series of articles on the technologies and economics of Digital TV production. The next part of the series will deal with camera and production issues. [ Back To Top ]   Broadband Net No Time Soon By BRIAN ROBINSON It seems that the Internet of the foreseeable future, far removed from its egalitarian roots, will be a strictly segregated place. Corporations with deep pockets will have the full range of online multimedia services available to them. But mass-market bottom feeders will probably have to subsist on something far less nutritious. At least, that seemed to be the message coming from a recent "forum on bandwidth" hosted by the Federal Communications Commission in Washington. Billed as the first-ever of its kind for the commission, it was designed to provide information that the FCC could use in ongoing proceedings on access reform and universal service, among others. Presentations at the forum were wide-ranging, but the consensus was that broadband mass-market access to the Internet - the basis for many of the current device manufacturer and content developer plans -- will not come without large investments by both telecom companies and Internet service providers (ISPs). Nor will it come soon. It's not a question of technologies, according to Stagg Newman, an executive with Bellcore. Many broadband technologies are either available now or soon will be. But it will take $500 per user or more to get them into the market, and with a potential universe of some 100 million users it is, he said, "a non-trivial capital deployment problem." From an ISP's view, said Netcom's Glee Harrah Cady, it's not who you can deliver Internet services to but at what price. Putting an Internet node in place in any locality takes up to $85,000 in one-time expenditures plus recurring monthly charges.ISPs can't afford to have local nodes for small markets. And Netcom ( and other ISPs) no longer judge it worthwhile to offer service through flat-rate pricing. The best available mass-market access technology now is ISDN, according to James Love, who is with the Consumer Project on Technology. But "monopoly pricing" by the local exchange carriers (LECs) is resulting in very high residential rates for ISDN. "While interest in the Internet is exploding and there is a great hunger for more bandwidth," Love said, "the LECs are killing ISDN as a transition technology." Telecom companies are asking the FCC to lift the access charge exemption granted last year to ISPs, claiming that the cost of handling Internet (particularly Web) traffic should be borne directly by Internet users. But "It is hard to imagine a more effective strategy for decimating the online information industry," argued John Curran, chief technical officer of BBN Planet. Though the specifics of the divergent arguments are complicated, the overall picture painted at the FCC forum was clear enough. Without changes in current tariffs and industry cost structures, the bleeding edge of the Internet revolution will be reserved for the bigger corporations for quite some years to come. Smaller businesses will see at least some of the benefits. But the mass market -- where consumer-level hopes for the Internet reside -- will suffer under average access rates of just 28.8 kbit/s to the end of the decade, with only basic ISDN rates available to it for several years after that. And that won't be nearly enough to satisfy current visions for the Internet. [ Back To Top ]   MCI's VAULT sets Net stage By BRIAN ROBINSON In what could be a stage-setter for future industry-wide Internet-based telecom services, MCI announced its new VAULT network architecture that combines the properties of both traditional telephone and packet-switched networks. The company will base a new variety of "V-class" products on the hybrid architecture in its drive to reach $2 billion in Internet revenues by the year 2000. So far, its Internet-based business is running at around $250 million. Instead of the separate lines that MCI's customers now need for phone and Internet use, the VAULT architecture allows both kinds of traffic to be converted to IP packets and sent over MCI's Internet backbone. A single line can be used for both kinds of traffic. In an example of a typical application, MCI described the case of an editor splicing together news footage for TV broadcast while a news producer "looks over his shoulder" from a news room a thousand miles away, while the two are connected and sharing voice and data computer-to-computer. The company said it is already using VAULT technology to allow customers of its directlineMCI product to update their account profiles through the World Wide Web. During the coming year MCI will use VAULT to expand features on its growing call center services, and will add half-a-dozen new V-class products for communications management, collaborative multimedia applications, fax applications and intranet managed services. In 1998, MCI will use VAULT to enhance its Intelligent Network Services (Vnet) applications. The combined voice/Internet services market is expected to be a boomer in the next few years. A recent study by Killen & Associates forecast the global market to exceed $63 billion by 2002, versus just $741 million this year. Nearly half of that will come in the American market. This will come at a cost, however. Local exchange carriers and interexchange carriers are expected to benefit at the disadvantage of internet service providers, while voice/Internet traffic will mostly supplant POTS revenues. Whether or not these predictions are met, it's clear that other telecom providers are already paralleling the MCI approach. Speaking at a recent Federal Communications Commission forum on bandwidth issues, Stagg Newman, an executive at Bellcore, termed Internet IP -- characterized by what he dubbed "IP Dialtone" features -- the "universal service of the future." And he pointed to two services as examples of what this will allow. "By 1998, I think you will start to see substantive voice and video on the Internet," he said. "I'm definitely not saying it's going to replace the telephone network. But you'll start seeing these services in a very real way." The other service is voice mail and fax. Neither is real-time communications, and therefore won't be handicapped by inherent latencies on the Internet. In this scenario, instead of direct (and expensive) long-distance connections for either of these services, a fax or voicemail is sent to a local server, where it is picked up and packetized, sent over the Internet to a server close to the distant location, and then converted for POTS and sent via modem to the recipient. "Over half the traffic today that goes overseas on the telephone network is actually fax," Newman said. "That traffic is all set to leave the current phone network and go on the Internet. The same thing for voicemail." [ Back To Top ]   NIST helps display measures Measuring the absolute display brightness (light emission) and effective contrast ratio (viewability) of flat panel displays has been a thorn in the side of progress for the fledgling industry. With flat panels beginning to push beyond notebook computer dimensions and utility toward higher production volumes of desktop computer use, dependable display contrast measurements are even more vital. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology are galloping to the rescue, with the development of a way of accurately measuring the contrast ratios of flat-panel displays. In some cases, the gap between conventional measuring techniques and that devised at NIST can be startling. The NIST researchers, Edward Kelley and Paul Boynton, measured one display conventionally and got a contrast ratio of 50 to 1. Using the NIST method the ratio expanded five-fold to 250 to 1. Apparently, the NIST team determined that the problem with conventional techniques was due to unavoidable reflections -- called "veiling glare" -- in the lens of the measuring instrument caused by illumination from the nearby lighter areas on the display surface. The NIST method uses an open-ended cone to substantially reduce these reflections, cutting the glare to an "insignificant" amount. The researchers said they hope to work with the display industry to help it develop a "firm measurement base." Kelley, who is chairman of the Video Electronics Standards Association's flat panel display measurement standards committee, said VESA members will vote later this year on adoption of a new display measurement standard that includes the NIST technique. The NIST technology announcement can be viewed at www.nist.gov. [ Back To Top ]   Lucent pushes 56K protocol By RICHARD DOHERTY Lucent Technologies has proposed a high-speed sensing protocol for future 56 kilobit asymmetric dial up access that will determine which protocols the consumer modem can accept. Lucent's Microelectronics Group has been pushing a so-called Pulse Code Modulation scheme that will give POTS line subscribers the option of sacrificing the high speed of the unidirectional 56 kbit capability in return for more symmetric 40 kbit or even 45 kbit access to and back from the central site. At a Telecommunications Industry Association meeting late last month, Lucent technical managers described a reliable method for quickly determining just what sort of modem was available at the subscriber's end, along with the way that the call was routed. That allows a determination as to whether the modem can truly support 56 kbit downstream speeds, or whether the central site would be better off in switching immediately to 33.6 kbit services. Chips incorporating this method would allow for flash memory reprogrammability, which means users could enjoy the commercial benefit of the high-speed modems now while the TIA and International Telecommunications Union process moves forward towards a final, global industry standard. In cooperation with Rockwell's initial K56 PLus technology, Lucent and Rockwell Semiconductor Systems have aligned their technologies into a single commercial standard called K56 Flex. Managers from both companies acknowledge there will be a fierce battle in the coming weeks and months for OEM Modem design commitments, and for central site and Internet Service Provider mind share. Together, they claim some 400 modem and central site/ISPs have already endorsed the K56 Flex technology over rival U.S. Robotics's re-programmable DSP (Texas Instruments' silicon) approach. US Robotics apparently plans to ship modems to more ISPs this month. Rockwell responded by saying it will ship its first 56 kbit modem chips this month also. [ Back To Top ]   Intel puts video mail on PCs By RICHARD DOHERTY Intel Corp. has marked the third anniversary of its ProShare PC Conferencing System with the videoconferencing industry's first time-shift, video mail record and playback capability operating directly off a host PC's hard drive. The Intel announcement propels two new elements of vernacular into our high tech world: Video Answering Machine and V-Mail. The ProShare can automatically record many hours worth of conferencing or playback a personal video message from the owner. Conference call recording consumes disk space at between one and two megabytes per minute. That means the average PC sold today has the ability to time-shift and record some two or three eight-hour business days worth of ProShare video calls. Owners of the existing Intel ProShare 200 system will be able to upgrade to the ProShare Conferencing Plus features for $179, beginning this week. New purchasers of the twin-card Intel ISDN ProShare 200 will get the new capability included at the existing purchase price of $1499. A software only upgrade - lacking a new lightweight boom headset - is available for $129. The system allows users to store and forward earlier calls. Access to specific points in the video mail are possible through a VCR-like interlace which allows fast-forwarding and rewinding at digital speeds. Intel says the system has already proven itself across the many global time zones in which the company does business, allowing users to send messages to PCs that are on 24 hours a day, ready to relay their personal video call contents to their users when they start their work shift. In another scenario, a CEO would send video mail to dozens of managers. In it he slams the news copy of a product from his opponent, angrily pointing to the latest economics figures on a white board and spreadsheet which accompany the e-mail. He glares into the camera and growls: " I want answers and ideas for a response by the noon meeting today." Welcome to a new era of managerial communications. Time shifted messaging with the clout of visual gesture and the implicit imperatives so important in today's society. Highly (albeit one-way) motivational. Unavoidable. Your equal or superior is there, gesturing at you. How can you possibly avoid rapid action? On another note, the ProShare 200 has already proven itself in helping communications between managers at geographically dispersed offices of a multinational company (like Intel) and for saving time. A manager in New York at 6PM can v-mail Tokyo just before their workday begins. Or..perhaps he didn't rise at 7 AM, he merely video recorded his message the night before. Or, perhaps the clever CEO established an ISDN call from a ProShare room at the golf course with a special conference room backdrop. Brings a new meaning to the term "Pro" doesn't it? Intel can be reached at www.Intel.com. [ Back To Top ]   Quote of the week AT a recent IEEE Consumer Electronics Society planning meeting, every engineer was asked what technical disciplines they specialized in. Most of the responses were "HDTV, PCS, DVD, Multimedia, Digital TV" and so forth. Then, not able to stand it any longer, an engineer from a major consumer electronics company modestly rose and sheepishly said: "I specialize in Antique TV," referring to his daunting task of designing analog NTSC receivers. [ Back To Top ]   IN OUR OPINION.......   What Price The Net? Hope is a fragile thing, no more so when it's built on hype. It seems most of us will have to postpone our visions for the Internet -- cheap telephony, flowing video, 3D graphics -- for a few years more. Of course, if you think about it, Joe and Jane Public were never told just when the hype they had been visited with would translate into reality. The hucksters of the Net, all the modern-day Barnums, were careful to swaddle their projections in layers of ifs and maybes. But the picture they presented, and the one we public swallowed whole, was of the Internet as savior, now. We are getting a flavor of what the real reality is. Promise oversold -- see America Online. The Internet as Great Leveler -- if you can afford it. This is not to say the Internet will not be the basis of a globe-spanning, real-time marvel. Someday. But first there are technical difficulties to overcome, there are management techniques to devise and learn, there are major cost problems to tackle. Meanwhile, the virtual industry that has been built up around the Internet hype faces a hard future. Many companies have been spirited into existence on a wish and a prayer. Good technology has been developed on the promise of a market. Still, even with the inevitable shakeout almost upon us, the Internet is still a wonder to behold. It's just a pity that most of us will have to continue beholding it from a distance for some time yet. [ Back To Top ]   Eyeing Congress The new keepers of the technology flame in Washington, DC have already told us we should not expect any great things from them this year. It seems they wish to rest after their struggles over the Telecommunications Act and other issues. We doubt they will have that luxury. Just as the pace of development has picked up in the technology business, so has the pressure for legislative action. The cable industry, for example, is promising still more increases in prices this year, after some major hikes in 1996. And, if basic telephone rates are getting cheaper, we haven't noticed them in our wallets so far. Now there's the the golden egg called the Internet is showing a few cracks. So keep an eye on Washington this year. It will probably have a lot more to say on what happens in the technology markets than it thinks or hopes it will. [ Back To Top ] Questions, Comments? We would like to hear from you! All contents are Copyright © 1998, The Envisioneering Group.