Surviving in Broadcasting's Standards “Ménage à Trois”

NTSC's 27-year exclusive reign as the sole US standard for video image creation, transmission, processing, switching, mixing, keying, recording, editing, distribution and broadcasting, started to end at the beginning of what SMPTE named as “The Digital (1980s) Decade at the Toronto Television Conference. Ten years later, NTSC's monarchical reign is being threatened by not one but three digital and a pair of newcomer analog contenders, all vigorously championed by technopolitically astute legions of television and communications industry technologists. — Broadcasters and program producers didn't nurture the television industry technologists that have led the recording format evolution parade from NTSC to CAV to D-1, D-2 and beyond, using recording media ranging from magnetic tape through magnetic and optical disks and on to optical paper tape. Neither did they sire or nurture the communications industry technologists who have shut down NTSC full bandwidth, long haul, terrestrial microwave transmission in favor of bandwidth-compressed DS-3 (44.7 Mbps) and even DS-1 (1.544 Mbps) tariffed terrestrial fiber optic transmission services. — This paper is purposefully organized and challengingly written, to encourage vigorous debate about the merits of the menage a trois rule which now confronts us. It concludes with some conjecture about the possibility of moving SMPTE onto a course “back to the future” — arriving finally at a single US standard for video image creation, transmission, processing, switching, mixing, keying, recording, editing, distribution and broadcasting.

Published

1989-02

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00746

ISBN

978-1-61482-918-8