Migration from Analog to DTV … Is it a Broadcasters Nightmare?

The migration from the analog emission world to the new DTV emission world has begun amongst a multitude of uncharted waters. The TV stations, networks, content providers, advertisers, and the consumer industry are all feeling their way along the migration path. The focus of this paper will deal with the issue[s] of data broadcasting, and the potential new business model that the TV station will have to deal with. — Migrating to digital is not simply a replication of the Analog service, if it was that simple one would question why are we spending so much time defining in great detail the syntax of the transmitted bit stream. The digital pipe line to the home is approximately 20Mb/s wide, 20Mb/s of what???. Some would believe that the 20Mb/s simply consists of picture and sound, WRONG. The digital pipe line to the home can carry HDTV channels, SDTV channels as well as Data channels. — So what is so complicated about carrying the data channels??, putting aside the regulatory issues there are numerous points to be considered, how will the service be sold, will the content provider have to pay for announcements, who will maintain the data service transmission schedule, will content providers also want data channel space, who will own the bits, etc. etc. — Transmission of Data can be opportunistic, synchronous, or even better synchronized. Many of these issues are not obvious at a first glance, with just a little exposure to the issues the topic can expand into a major area of concern, and an area where false moves can create a model that will never make any money for anybody. — This paper will deal only with the unidirection data broadcasting model, an even more complex set of issues surrounds the Bidirectional interactive model, that will have to wait for another time.

Published

1999-07

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M001178

ISBN

978-1-61482-948-5