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DTV winner? Digital TV battle may be ending, as PC side backs off By G. Leopold & J. Yoshida, EE Times Washington -- The war may be ending. The digital-TV video-format conflict that has pitted TV manufacturers against PC vendors could be fizzling, with the PC industry--at least for now--giving in to some broadcasters' demands for 1,080-line-interlaced HDTV-video transmission. The PC camp had previously written off that format as too costly. But Intel Corp., for one, is now considering providing for 1,080-interlaced-line (1080i) transmissions on the PC platform via an add-on tuner card. The need for such a card, should it arise, would have broad implications for the electronics industry, opening a new market for chip vendors and board makers and posing some dicey design issues for system houses. The first signs that the PC industry may be relenting on the format issue appeared last week when Intel senior vice president Ron Whittier said in an interview that his company is "extending the initial DTV video formats" proposed in April by the DTV Team, an alliance among Intel, Microsoft Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp. The trio had joined forces to promote the PC as a DTV-ready platform that would be upgraded every few years in accordance with the evolution of the PC '9X road map defined by Microsoft and Intel. Whittier explained that Intel's revised game plan "will allow an add-on tuner card capability" that would allow a PC to receive 1080i video signals and down-convert them to display images in such PC-appropriate video formats as 480 or 720 progressive lines. "Of course, it is an expensive solution," he said, "and consumers would have to pay for it." The cost question is no small matter, since the DTV Team had hoped to persuade broadcasters to accept its premise that the PC, with its ability to handle some video decoding and format conversion in software, would be the best bet for proliferating the DTV installed base. The argument was that consumers wouldn't be forced to pay for additional hardware provided broadcasters stuck with progressive-scan transmission and worked with a subset of the Advanced Television Systems Committee's (ATSC) approved formats for video-signal transmission that excluded 1080i. Traditional TV manufacturers, meanwhile, pledged that their TVs would receive all 18 formats of the ATSC specification, including the 1080i HDTV format. "We still believe that PCs could offer the lowest-cost solution for DTV," Intel's Whittier said last week. "But we now think we should look into a solution with add-on tuner features, in order to handle higher-end video formats." He called the company's decision "a pragmatic choice." (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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