From the Roundtable: True gains of HDTV conversion may take years to sort out

Several hundred million analog television transmitters are now little more than scrap material.

Television station engineers hit the “plate off” button last Friday, severing high voltage for the last time to powerful vacuum tubes what were part of the mysterious process bringing television into our homes.

Every TV station across the land is supposed to be operating digitally, their analog transmitters extinguished for good.

Television has come a long way since June 29, 1936, when NBC’s W2XBS atop the Empire State Building signed on. Viewers watched TV’s greenish images on a mirror in the lid of these handmade receivers. The quest for improvements in TV images, though, has been an international effort. Researchers on both sides of the Atlantic have pressed for finer resolution and higher definition over the years.

In 1936, Britain’s BBC beat us handily with the world’s first regular service. In 1941, the U.S. froze definition at 525 lines of resolution (a larger number of lines means a higher image definition) and an “aspect ratio” (vertical to horizontal image size) of 4:3; both standards were finally abandoned just a few days ago.

There’s nothing new about HDTV. The 819 line HDTV that I first saw in Paris almost 50 years ago was impressive. After Liberation in 1944, Edward R. Murrow panicked his superiors at CBS reporting that Frenchman René Barthélemy was demonstrating 1,000-line HDTV in his Montrouge laboratory. Frozen at 819 lines when the Eiffel Tower station opened on October 1, 1950, anyone who saw French television envied the movie-like image quality. Meanwhile, our 525 line standard was considered both good enough and too entrenched, so we stuck with it.

The conversion to all-HDTV brings sharper pictures, but requiring the complete reconstruction of every TV station in the land has cost the industry billions of dollars – and it was an unfunded federal mandate. Spurred by Japanese competition and the desire to retain some TV set manufacturing in the United States, the HDTV conversion process has gone on for decades, and poor government administration resulted in confusion.

This country’s conversion to digital television has been part of a wide-ranging industrial exercise that has seen various deadlines come and go. The transition was supposed to take place in February. It’s been a messy process, and it may take years to sort out the true gains.

Digital TV requires less bandwidth due to digital video compression. By squeezing more channels within the same frequency band, there are frequencies made available for other uses, such as cell telephone transmissions.

The federal government, as it goes through a beleaguering budgeting process, has been deriving financial gains by dividing up and auctioning certain parts of the frequency spectrum.

Most television set owners hardly noticed the switch from analog to digital because cable or satellite providers made the conversion.

But are we really watching HDTV? While images look snappier on flat screens that are all the rage and the aspect ratio goes from 4:3 to a more theatrical 16:9, so called “high” definition may not be as elevated in some cases as it is in others.

Then there is an environmental question: How do we process the tens of millions of TV sets headed for scrap heaps? There’s lots of nasty stuff lurking in a typical receiver, and some municipalities charge a separate and distinct fee to handle various curbside “gifts” of electronics.