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Defining Vision: The battle for the future of Television

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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.

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!

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.

The story of the evolution of high-definition television surrounds us. Yet even now, at the dawn of its actual debut, few people really know much about it. Joel Brinkley's book is a teriffic way to learn about this undeniably fascinating story of the evolution of HDTV. He weaves tension, humor and science into an interesting tale of international and domestic political intrigue, all the while never losing sight of his mission. His ability to explain the political side of the scientific challenge, and how it comes together, is clever, no doubt about it. Mr.Brinkley's account offers readers a grand illustration of American know-how, creativity, politics and invention. I do plan to read it again.

I work in the television broadcast industry and this is a must read if you want to learn about the origins of HDTV, the players who made HDTV a reality, and how the standards for HDTV were defined. The author is an authority on the subject and provides an excellent description of the systems, history, etc. that both technical and business professionals can understand. At my company this has become required reading. I highly recommend this book.

DEFINING VISION by Joel Brinkley is as comprehensive as any history behind the development of HDTV/DTV can ever possibly get. The text of this book will surely be required possessions for technological historians for at least the next 1000 years.

The book strikes from its first page by its fictional style while documenting complexly intrigrated facts about the development of HDTV. The book is simply absorbing; it creates a suspenceful atmosphere comparable to movies such as "The Firm." Truly a great book on the history of HDTV and far ahead on everything I have read one year later (1998) on the same subject matter.

One minor shortcoming of this book is that it fails to investigate the leading role Japanese electronics companies will undoubtedly play in manufacturing television sets to the new American high-definition standard. But generally the book is painstakingly researched and elegantly written. A must for anyone who wants to get up to speed with the next great new consumer electronic product

I've owned my copy of this book for some five or six years now, found at a thrift shop for $2. Haven't read it until just now, just put it on a shelf and forgot about it because I don't really care about HDTV. So what?, pretty pictures! Who cares? Don't even have cable -- what's on the network news shows and PBS wastes too much of my time already.

Well, one day I was short of reading material so I picked up Brinkley's book. I never had considered the multibillion-dollar stakes, the political infighting and outfighting, the corporate and international competition, nor the technology of digital broadcasting.

What I found most intriguing about the book was the supposition that digital broadcasting was considered by all the "experts" to be absolutely "impossible". It took a non-broadcast engineer, Woo Paik, to pull it off -- and only because, as he said, he didn't know enough to know that it could not be done.

Brinkley's narrative reads like a techno-thriller, which I suppose it actually is. He covers the doings of the tech engineers, the corporations that in the end combined into the Grand Alliance, the original digital HDTV inventors the Japanese NHK engineers, the machinations of the Broadcast Barons, the Cable Mongols, the FCC, the radio and satellite guys, the politicians and of course the lowlife lobbyists and lawyers.

Probably the most disgusting part of the story is the original motivation for creating HDTV by the Broadcast Barons and their lobbyist lackeys. No, it was not for any lofty, noble reason such as serving the public interest or bringing quality programming to the masses. It was actually for their own greedy self-serving interest: that of protecting their portion of the radiofrequency spectrum from takeover by public-service agencies such as the police, fire departments, and emergency medical services. And when they realized that actually getting HDTV into broadcast operation would cost them big bucks in equipment upgrades, they actually worked behind the scenes to undermine HDTV once their political purpose was accomplished! It's all right here in this book; read all about it!

Remember back in the '40s and '50s when they all said TV would result in an uplifting of public awareness and public virtue, what with all that quality educational programming and dutiful community discourse making our business and government "leaders" accountable to the public ? What up with that? Remember, we're talking about the very same people who brought us that! That's probably why nowadays everything in our society has to be presented as entertainment.

And because everything has to be entertainment, that's one of the root causes for the current state of our national and societal situation.

This is a facinating and well-written review of the development and introduction of HDTV. It focuses on the political interaction of government agencies, the broadcasters, and R&D efforts, more so than the technology. It is ironic that although the U.S. led the Japanese in the research and development of digital TV, by that time there was no domestic TV manufacturing capability to take advantage of this.(Note: I read the original hard cover edition and not the soft-cover 2009 update.)