Defining Vision: The battle for the future of Television [Hardcover]

Joel Brinkley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0151000875 | ISBN-13: 978-0151000876 | Edition: First U. S. Edition (stated)

In this account of the political wrangling and technological breakthroughs that led to the creation of HDTV, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter “does for television...what Tracy Kidder did for computers” (Kirkus Reviews). Index.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

High-definition television (HDTV) will dramatically increase the quality of the display of traditional television as well as the much-anticipated set-top-box computer/television hybrids. And every major electronics company--and the U.S. and Japanese governments--is already imagining the unimaginably large financial rewards to be reaped by those lucky enough to have perfected the right gear at the right time: just about every piece of hardware in the television industry will be replaced or supplanted, from your television to the international broadcast infrastructure.

Brinkley's book introduces us to the major institutions and individuals from industry, government, and academia involved in this frantic race, and does an admirable job of untangling their labyrinthine relations. My only quibble with the book is that it should have included at least a few color photos of HDTV compared to regular TV. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the future of television technology--before it happens.

From Publishers Weekly

This is the story of High-Definition Television (HDTV)-its development, the corporations involved, and their manipulation by the federal government. HDTV is television with the picture quality of film. It was developed when TV executives feared that the FCC would distribute unassigned channels to mobile communication companies that specialize in such things as police communication systems. To stymie the FCC, the television industry latched onto-almost accidentally-the idea of HDTV, which needs two channels to broadcast its picture. The government set up a lottery for the best version of HDTV, and the race was on. NHK, the Japanese television network, already had a system in place and was the early leader. But what is interesting here is the scampering of American companies to compete and, sometimes, to survive. The Sarnoff Research Center-originally RCA-came back to life after a decade of failure only to produce an inferior HDTV; Zenith, on the verge of bankruptcy, joined with AT&T with almost disastrous results; and MIT, with academic arrogance, couldn't find the right stuff. But the most intriguing company of all was General Instruments in San Diego. It started out making secure cable boxes for HBO, but through the genius of basically one man, Woo Paik, found what was thought to be unattainable: digital, high-definition television. Brinkley, a New York Times political editor, takes us from testing to the trials, and from the cutthroat competition to the formation of the "Grand Alliance," whereby most of the companies banded together to create the final product. He has written a very complicated, though at times utterly absorbing, history that will appeal mostly to those involved with technology and the TV industry.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First U. S. Edition (stated) edition (January 31, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151000875
• ISBN-13: 978-0151000876
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #644,607 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University, a position he assumed in 2006 after a 23-year career with The New York Times. There, he served as a reporter, editor and Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent.
At Stanford, Brinkley writes an op-ed column on foreign policy that appears in about 50 newspapers and Websites in the United States and around the world each week, syndicated by Tribune Media Services.
Brinkley is a native of Washington D.C., and a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He began his journalism career at the Associated Press and over the following years worked for the Richmond (Va.) News Leader and the Louisville Courier Journal before joining the Times in 1983.
At The New York Times, Brinkley served as Washington correspondent, White House correspondent and chief of the Times Bureau in Jerusalem, Israel. He spent more than 10 years in editing positions including Projects Editor in Washington, Political Editor in New York and Investigations Editor in Washington following the September 11 attacks. He served as political writer in Baghdad during the fall of 2003. He also covered technology issues including the Microsoft anti-trust trial and was serving as foreign-policy correspondent when he left the Times in June 2006.
Over the last 30 years Brinkley has reported from 46 states and more than 50 foreign countries. He has won more than a dozen national reporting and writing awards. He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1980 and in the following years was twice a finalist for an investigative reporting Pulitzer (for one, as a member of a team). He was a director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism from 2001 to 2006.
Mr. Brinkley is the author of five books: The Iran-Contra Affair (with Steve Engelberg) published by Times Books in 1988; The Circus Master's Mission, a novel, published by Random House in 1989; Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television , published by Harcourt Brace in 1998; U.S. vs. Microsoft: The Inside Story of the Landmark Case (with Steve Lohr) published by McGraw Hill in 2001; and Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land, published by Public Affairs Books in 2011. He has also contributed to several other books, including the chapter on George W. Bush in The American Presidency, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2004.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Roller-coaster ride through digital TV history, January 14, 2004

By 

Ralph D. Berenger (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Defining Vision: How Broadcasters Lured the Government into Inciting a Revolution in Television, Updated and Expanded (Paperback)

In the early 1980s US broadcasters faced two major headaches spawned by greed and jingoism. Their comfortable, tidy, oligopolistic-and profitable-broadcast world was about to be shaken by the digital revolution, where foes and friends were often indistinguishable. New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Joel Brinkley takes the reader on a roller coaster through boardrooms, bureaucracy, technocracy, and hubris (individual and national) in "Defining Vision." It is a ride worth taking for broadcast students, educators, historians, and international political economists.

Represented by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), radio and television companies considered the broadcast band spectrum their personal property. This largesse suddenly came under assault from the land mobile industry that wanted more spectrum space for a variety of public interest broadcast services such as police, firefighters, ambulance, quick response units, and other emergency services. Broadcasters, too, saw a new threat from across the sea. The Japanese spent $300 million and hundreds of thousands of engineering man-hours developing high definition television (HDTV). NHK unveiled its Muse system in 1986 to US policymakers and consumers. The picture quality was superior to the current analog systems in the United Sates, and Japanese-made monitors were designed to fit the wider formatted movies without the annoying letterbox effect.

Brinkley chronicles the scrimmages involving development of HDTV in the US like a general writing his wartime memoirs-if that general had access to the thinking of his opposition, that is. First the grand alliance-RCA, Zenith, AT&T, Phillips, General Instruments and MIT-had to admit that a victory by any one of them in the costly race to develop HDTV would be a defeat for the others. They were able to convince a willing FCC Advisory Committee that cooperation was possible in building a single system. Committee chairman Richard Wiley's role in HDTV cannot be understated (and Brinkley doesn't). His single-minded pursuit of high definition television as the national (and, it turned out, international) standard most probably resulted in its acceptance.

US broadcasters had worried privately and publicly as well, that the future of television would be dictated by a consortium of Japanese electronics magnates and NHK, the world's second-largest broadcasting company. Across the Atlantic, the European Union was equally concerned, and promised up to a billion dollars to Europeans to come up for a system on its own or else adopt the Japanese HDTV, since the Americans seemed not to be players in the game as the century's ninth decade unfolded. But the European effort never got off paper. US broadcasters at first fretted about a new "yellow peril" that posed as great a threat to them as it did to the automobile industry a decade earlier. Ever opportunistic, however, broadcasters found the Japanese an unlikely ally in their fight to snatch the unused frequencies from land mobile companies. HDTV, as the Muse system showed, required additional bandwidth space. Obviously, they reasoned, Congress and the FCC could not allocate precious broadcast spectrum space to land mobile users when they, the "rightful frequency heirs," needed the frequencies for HDTV.

At the same time, MIT's Nicholas Negroponte, who Brinkley treats somewhat derisively, was telling anyone who would listen that "HDTV had to be digital," not analog, which would allow for signal compression that would fit into existing frequencies. One naysayer echoed a common broadcast engineering complaint at the time: "we will have digital HDTV when we have anti-gravitation machines." Broadcast engineers at the major manufacturers nodded in agreement: digital high definition television technologically could not be done. The NAB, in its attempt to protect its space band largesse, inadvertently kicked off a race to develop HDTV in the United States that took on the trappings of a crusade to "rescue" the future of television in the United States from the hands of foreign interests. Along the way, General Instruments research engineer Woo Paik invented digital television (because, as a non-broadcast engineer, he didn't know that "it was impossible").

HDTV uses a compressed digital broadcast signal that not only remained within a single frequency but allowed broadcasters additional capacity to sell secondary services such as pager services, email, Internet connections, digital music, and pay-per-view movies. With such an entrée to new revenue flows, the reader would be surprised to learn the depth of NAB's animus to HDTV. Simply put, broadcasters used the HDTV concept to wrest away additional public airwaves spectra and then, among themselves, grumbled that they were unwilling to invest in new high definition cameras, monitors, and other equipment that would allow them to broadcast signals in both progressive scan (favored by the computer programming and manufacturing sector) and interlaced (favored by broadcasters) modes. Another opponent of a high definition television standard was the fledgling computer manufacturing industry in the mid-1990s, which didn't want the additional expense of adding interlacing decoding to what essentially was a dedicated proscan system.

After seven years of ups and downs in a process that often threatened to sputter, splinter, and spin totally out of control, HDTV in a digital form arrived in the US shortly after Thanksgiving in 1997. Despite all predictions to the contrary, the HDTV "turkey" arrived fully stuffed with enough goodies to ease its transition into the marketplace. The result was acceptance of the Americanized international standard by the European Union and the final, if not sad, acknowledgment by NHK that its analog Muse system was outmoded before it even got much beyond a toehold in its native land.

In "Defining Vision," Brinkley has crafted a highly readable, almost techno-mystery story with well-defined characters: heroes, villains, and rascals alike. At times he seems to get into the heads of the key players, which he explains as a literary device borne from extensive interviews with the principals who told him what they were thinking at the time. The effect rounds the edges of what could have been a highly technical, heuristic, and sloggish recitation of engineering reports, public hearings, and dreary diary entries from the participants. To his credit, the author explains his process to readers in an epilogue, thus enhancing the book's credibility. Furthermore, in this paperback edition, the author has updated and expanded several sections over the hardcover version, including an appendix and FAQ that are instructional.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Can't Wait for the Sequel, October 14, 2000

By 

Steve Eitman (Thousand Oaks, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Defining Vision: How Broadcasters Lured the Government into Inciting a Revolution in Television, Updated and Expanded (Paperback)

I'm reading this book a second time (a year later) because it's such a great introduction to players in the HDTV world. Brinkley chose a suspense style, and it really works well. I am excited about HDTV and turned each page holding my breath - hoping for a successful conclusion. Now I'm looking for more works that go beyond 1998, and can't find any more fulfilling...and the story isn't over yet!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good job at tying together all the pieces and viewpoints., March 31, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Huntsville, Alabama) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Defining Vision: The battle for the future of Television (Hardcover)

Having had the opportunity to check the authenticity with several of the principles in the book, my hat's off to Joel Brinkley. He ties all the factions together that brought us DTV. It is a story with more twists and turns than you expect that comes mixing an industry that hates to change with new technology. Add in the governments of the U.S. and Japan, and it really becomes fun. Mr. Brinkley did a masterful job telling the story. This is a must read for anyone interested in television.