Audio Video News

DisplaySearch, a global video-display market-research and consulting firm, last week hosted their annual HDTV Conference, a two-day affair devoted to—you guessed it—HDTV. Held at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California, this year's conference began with a keynote address by Mark Cuban, founder of HDNet, which will be broadcasting their recording of the event in September and October.

Cuban's primary thesis was that the display industry is the most abused in the world, what with FCC regulations, CableCARD problems, razor-thin profit margins, and so on. He also noted that display manufacturers continue to improve the quality of their products while most content providers are using more-efficient codecs to squeeze more lower-quality channels into the available bandwidth rather than improve the quality of the image.

He advocated that manufacturers and consumers must fight back, lobbying for image quality over channel quantity, especially in the face of multicasting. Certainly, that view was shared by the attendees, as evidenced by the real-time polling that DisplaySearch conducted throughout the conference using nifty wireless keypads. When asked which they preferred, quality or quantity of HDTV, almost half the audience said they favored quality over anything else, and another 37% said that multicasting is okay as long as at one channel is always HD.

The rest of the day was occupied by panels discussing things like "Expanding Current and Next-Generation HD Content: The Technical Challenges," "Lessons from the Retail Channels," and "The Global TV Market/HD Policy Update and Outlook." Unfortunately, many of the presenters in these sessions used their time as a commercial for their respective companies. One notable exception was Bjorn Dybdahl of Bjorn's Audio/Video Home Theater, a retailer in San Antonio, Texas, who made a compelling case for educating the consumer about HDTV, with several entertaining and informative video clips he runs on local stations.

Tom Norton went to Day 2 of the conference, and he'll report on it in an upcoming news story. But he had to leave before the last session, which I made a point of attending, since it was the most technical of all. Representatives from chip makers Zoran, Analog Devices, Gennum, Silicon Optix, and Silicon Image presented tech data on their video processors and other technologies.

Among the most interesting presentations was Analog Devices' work with JPEG2000, a new codec that was recently approved and adopted by the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) as the standard compression algorithm for digital cinema. Unlike MPEG-2 or –4, which process several frames at once to provide motion estimation and compensation, JPEG2000 (or JP2K, as it's sometimes called) processes each frame independently, which is better for real-time HD encoding and distribution, especially around the house. Also, the types of artifacts it generates are much less obvious and objectionable than those of MPEG, and its latency is much lower since it doesn't process multiple frames at once.

In their booth, Analog Devices was demonstrating wireless transmission of HD content using JP2K, and it was impressive, with much faster response and fewer artifacts than MPEG. In addition, JP2K is highly scalable, allowing one bitstream to be viewed on everything from an HDTV to a cell phone; each device uses only the data it can handle, with an obvious tradeoff in quality. Finally, it's much less expensive to implement than MPEG, both in terms of hardware costs and licensing fees (of which there are none with JP2K). This was a technology demo, not an impending product—wireless HDMI is at least a couple of years away—so don't get too excited just yet. But if the conference is any indication, the future of HDTV is bright indeed.