Audio Video News

<I>Brendan Fraser, Elizabeth Hurley, Frances O'Connor, Orlando Jones, Miriam Shor, Brian Doyle-Murray. Directed by Harold Ramis. Aspect ratio: 2.35:1 (anamorphic). Dolby Digital 5.1. 93 minutes. 2000. Fox Home Entertainment 2000815. PG-13. $26.98.</I>

Less than seven years after putting its first satellite in position, <A HREF="http://www.directv.com">DirecTV</A> has signed its ten millionth subscriber. The El Sugundo, CA&ndash;based direct broadcast satellite service now claims ten percent of the US television market.

Just imagine if you could have this for your home theater system: <A HREF="www.ibm.com">IBM</A> announced last week the T220, which the company is calling the world's highest-resolution flat panel monitor. Unfortunately for us, IBM says that the new display will enable "photograph-quality" imaging for science, banking, engineering, publishing, medicine, and business-critical visualization tasks, and is not likely to appear in consumer living rooms anytime soon.

The quality of electrical power is often the limiting factor for high performance audio and video systems. Many manufacturers have attempted to address this limitation---caused in large part by electromagnetic interference (EMI) and radio frequency interference (RFI)---by designing and marketing surge protectors, AC line filters, uninterruptible power supplies, and various sorts of AC enhancers and generators. Many of these solutions are bulky, expensive, or only partially effective.

EchoStar's Mark Jackson puts it succinctly: "Our customers want access to more channels, and they are increasingly demanding bandwidth-intensive HDTV channels." But there is only so much bandwidth available between the satellite in the sky and the dish on the ground, and that bandwidth is carefully divided among channels. The more channels on the system, the less bandwidth available for added features like HDTV.

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.st.com">STMicroelectronics</A>, which manufactures semiconductor devices used in set-top boxes (STBs), High Definition Television (HDTV), and other sophisticated digital consumer equipment, announced what it describes as the "world's most advanced chip" for the HDTV market. STM says that the new STi7020 "brings an unprecedented level of integration to the HDTV industry" and adds that the chip is expected to play a key role in the transition from standard definition to HDTV technology.

If it were legal, how would you record a high definition television program? High-definition digital video signals propagate at a data rate of 24Mbits/second, a rate that would quickly fill up the approximately five gigabytes of storage available on standard recordable DVDs. That's barely enough to record a half-hour sitcom, if the commercials were deleted.