The First 2-Way Set-top Box

In the mid-70's Warner cable executives in Columbus, Ohio (this author's hometown) decided they needed something to attract and keep people subscribed to their newfangled cable TV network. At the time, Warner offered 36 channels - a large number then - but did not really have much programming to provide. Subscribers, ultimatley, did not want to pay for an empty service and began to cancel their subscriptions. In 1977, executives quickly recruited a production team whose mandate it was to develop 8 hours of original programming for the service now being called "QUBE." Producers knew it was possible to build a two-way system at the time and thought it would be a great gimmick to attract people's interest. With help from Pioneer, the only cable plant with early two-way technologies, the QUBE team put together a set-top box featuring buttons viewers could push during shows. While watching, viewers could vote, select movies to watch, play along with game shows, and more. QUBE was an instant hit. This author, in fact, can attest to the fact that all the kids in town wanted QUBE - though most did not even have cable TV, yet. Word of mouth there and beyond traveled fast. Early programming featured home shopping, children's shows, a movie channel, and music videos - formats that all morphed into QVC, Nickelodeon, The Movie Channel, and MTV networks. All good things come to an end, however. According to many who worked at QUBE (and many are still working in the industry today), the conclusion of this early set-top box network experiment was due to the fact that: 1) American Express, the investor partner, dropped out of the cable business; 2) other desirous Warner cable franchises stretched QUBE's ability to provide content to their communities; 3) Warner's Atari division lost $1 billion in 1983 which, obviously, drained the company; and 4) subscribers figured out how to rig the set-tops for free movies with a safety clip at the back. QUBE was soon sold to Viacom. Looking back, QUBE was a significant achievement: it strongly demonstrated viewers wanted and would pay for interactive ITV programming. Additionally, QUBE proved there was room for another system, though would take another 15 years for one to emerge.

Meanwhile, post 1983, the basic one-way, analog set-top box decoder began to appear in everyone’s home. Today, some 90 million homes have several boxes and/or are upgrading to advanced analog or digital cable services because of aggressive marketing efforts by cable providers. Plain old cable TV, though, introduced an important interactive technology to the masses: the remote control unit.

Remote Control

A small, handheld device that offers a variety of buttons and functionalities, the remote control unit (affectionately called "the clicker", "the pusher", the "zapper", or "the changer") permits the user today to easily manipulate the TV set and its accessibility to content. The complete adoption of this handheld technology over the years by the television industry, compression technologies, and the introduction of new content networks over time has created the phenomenon known as "channel surfing." Channel surfing, of course, is the metaphor which describes the casual, almost mindless activity, of skipping between channels at will by punching buttons. An early form of interactivity with the television, the remote control effectively teaches the viewer to be selective and interactive quickly. Before we had the remote control, however, the viewer had to get up from a comfortable couch, move across the room, and laboriously turn a series of knobs. Thanks to technologies invented by the German navy to help ram enemy ships in World War I with remote motorboats, we're all a little more sedentary. In World War II, early remote control technology continued to be used for war purposes to set off bombs. In the 1940's, however, the U.S. government sought new ways to use this technology in the public sector. One well-known result, eventually, was the garage door opener. It wasn't until 1952, though, that the first TV remote control unit appeared. Called, aptly, the "Lazy Bone", this remote unit was manufactured by a company called Venus (Note: A Microsoft set-top box project in China is called "Venus"). The Lazy Bone remote came with a 10 or 100 foot cable and was attached to the remote control and the TV. When clicked, a command would rotate the TV tuner inside the set and change the channel. Other remote systems employed different technologies in the 60's and beyond, though, they always seemed to encounter problems. Light sensitive cells on the TV set, for example, were supposed to pick up a signal from the remote, though these cells were also sensitive to sunlight, which would turn the volume of the program up at random. Ultrasonics built into remote control systems would cause dogs to bark when they came into the room. Eventually infrared (individual digital codes of light pulses) would become the standard. Early implementations of this would not permit the light to travel through objects, however. Today, firms, like Interlink Electronics, offer remotes with pen input pads, wireless keyboards, and integrated mouse pointing devices. Veil Interactive has technology that can send data through the light of the TV set to one's remote and to a Palm Pilot. Another company, Pace Micro, a set-top box developer in the U.K., has developed a remote control handheld unit, which doubles as a smart home device. Called the "Shopping Mate", this "remote" has a large screen and a clickable interface featuring all kinds of software. Soon, these devices will offer voice input control of the TV and, of course, telephony. In advance of that day, some companies around the world are also exploring the use of wireless cell services to transmit text to a TV show, as we mentioned before. Producers will want to take advantage of all these opportunities.

REVOLUTION

The Digital TV Signal

In the early 1980's, just when cable programming became serious competition for the film industry, Japanese representatives from NHK introduced High Definition Television technology to Hollywood called "NHK Hi-vision", a type of digital signal technology. NHK Hi-vision was revolutionary because it was able to transmit better pictures and sound inside a wider screen - something the film industry had always been keen to provide. Unfortunately, the High Definition Television (HDTV) signal, as it came to be called, required several times the bandwidth (20 MHz) than an NTSC analog signal (6 MHz). In addition to usage of spectrum and compression problems, there were many incompatibilities with the present analog system. For the next 16 years until 1996, the standardization debate raged while Japan put a non-NTSC analog version of HDTV in place. Over 23 well-funded international proposals from corporations and educational institutions were submitted to the FCC. These proposals tried to answer: 1) Would an HDTV transmission be analog, a mixture of analog and digital, or purely digital? 2) How would the signal transmit: over terrestrial broadcast, satellite or, cable? 3) What part of the broadcast spectrum would HDTV occupy? 4) What video compression scheme would be used to fit a 20 MHz signal into a 6 MHz one? Finally, in 1990, after much haggling, the FCC decided an HDTV purely digital signal would be simultaneously broadcast until the current analog signal was phased out. In order to receive this signal, people would be required to buy either a digital TV set, a digital set-top box , or digital TV tuner card and all broadcast stations would have to upgrade their facility to digital. Eventually, four proposals seemed serious, but no one the winner. A suggestion was made to form a "Grand Alliance" between these contenders: AT&T, General Instrument, MIT, Philips, Sarnoff, Thomson and Zenith. Still after much discussion in 1996, the FCC adopted the scheme backed by the government-appointed Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC). This digital standard was based on an MPEG-2 compression scheme proposed by the Grand Alliance. It was also that year that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandated the adoption of the digital signal by 2006. In 1997 the FCC bean to allocate pure digital spectrum, not analog or a blend, to broadcasters. The FCC also instituted a graduated schedule with 2006 as the cut off date for all broadcasters. Many countries around the world, however, have adopted the Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) or the Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB) schemes. Their deadlines somewhat vary from that of the U.S.

Important broadcast digital signal technologies:

Signal	Region of Adoption
Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC)	North America, Taiwan,
Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB)	31 countries
Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB)	Japan

As mentioned earlier, there is still great controversy surrounding technologies that enable the digital signal in the U.S. Though many commercial, local affiliate, and public station broadcasters are well on their way towards this transformation, competing modulation schemes (8VSB and COFDM) are providing much controversy on the road towards standardization.

For example, much work has been done in technologies and methodologies which support the 8VSB scheme. Zenith and NxtWave, for example, have already invested millions into 8VSB which works with the ATSC digital signal. COFDM, on the other hand, backed by Sinclair Broadcasting and growing number of broadcasters that support DVB, is garnering serious industry-wide support for the way it can be picked up with a cheap omni-directional bow tie antenna rather than the more expensive directional one. Those that support the 8VSB-ATSC scheme warn legislators that making such a complete switch now will cost broadcasters a lot of money and completely disrupt the businesses of those restructuring their factories to produce chips en masse for 8VSB. Sinclair Broadcasting, on the other hand, insists that the U.S. need not exchange one for the other. Rather, those supporters say, they should adopt both so broadcasters can decide which signal technology they want to use: ATSC or DVB. During hearings in Washington D.C., in the summer of 2000, Congressman William "Billy" Tauzin, chairman of U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection committee, sought demonstrations of both schemes. During those hearings, the COFDM demonstration was more successful and reliable. At the time, Tauzin expressed frustration that Congress may have to extend the digital signal transition deadline beyond 2006 in order to research further and, possibly, properly provide services that can adequately be received.

Part of that process towards the deadline, is the taking back of analog spectrum from broadcasters and the reallocation and auctioning of it to other companies for new data services such as mobile communications and datacasting. Some new companies have emerged to buy up this analog spectrum and are rapidly building databroadcasting networks. Though not talked about much in the press, these new data networks will have tremendous growth opportunities. Such data services, for example, are likely to serve wireless handheld devices, set-top appliances, and add to digital signal transmissions, especially HDTV. Over the coming years, we will see many developments in this area that will directly compete or collaborate with cable and satellite broadcasters.

In the meanwhile, the big networks, some cable broadcasters, PBS with local affiliates, and some local stations are broadcasting HDTV programming in the U.S., though there are not many digital TV sets or receivers to display them. Prices are simply too high at the moment for the average person and there is not much HDTV programming available. In fact, some TV manufacturers such as Sony and Konka (Korean) have halted their DTV production until these issues are worked out. Some programmers have also cut back their HDTV broadcasts until the same. In general, digital terrestrial broadcasting is experiencing severe slow growth. In the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, digital terrestrial broadcasting is in high gear. A company called ONdigital, for example, which launched November 18^, 1998, has aggressively developed their platform ever since. It now offers access to the Internet, gaming from Two Way TV, interactive text on screen, digital teletext, and tcommerce. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

New Media and the Internet Change Everything

During a long hashing out period (between the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s), many other important developments occurred to bring the new media and, eventually, the ITV revolution forward: 1) the cable industry established analog networks around the country that encouraged the emergence of general and specialized interest cable channels; 2) the PC revolution gave the television and film producing community powerful suites of software to digitally edit and manage work, especially those from Adobe, Macromedia, and Avid. The CD-ROM industry moved powerfully forward to become the stalking horse for development of interactive content and applications. (Note: This was the first time the author of a digital product used the same machine to make the final product the consumer bought to play it); 3) A mix of analog and digital consumer electronics devices appeared such as music CDs, VCRs, camcorders, laser disks, and digital video disks (DVDs). Nothing was as influential as the arrival of the Internet, however. The television industry would feel the tremendous weight of it.

The Internet first emerged when Leonard Kleinrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1961 wrote "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" and J.C.R. Licklider of MIT (and soon to be head of ARPANET, the network that would become the first implementation of the Internet), in 1962 wrote about a "Galactic Network" of computers in several memos. The original motivation for the creation of such a network was to establish a decentralized method of communications in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Much work was accomplished, of course; although, too much to recite here. The first nodes were set up at four universities such as the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah in the early 80’s. It wasn't until much later in the early 90's, after serious developments in infrastructure, protocols and languages, that a distributed, interactive, text, audio, and video environment was made available to the public. All this would eventually be called "The World Wide Web" or "Web" for short.

Two important innovations made, the Web, a widely distributed interactive rich multi-medium possible: 1) in 1991 Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee, at the Swiss European Institute for Particle Physics (CERN), posted his ideas for the "World Wide Web" to a small newsgroup called "alt.hypertext." His ideas eventually evolved into the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a technology Berners-Lee and cohorts standardized and made freely available to the public; and, 2) in 1993 Marc Andreesen and company at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed the first piece of software to visually browse content on the Internet called "Mosaic." Up until that time, navigation of the Internet was done through a cumbersome, text-based menu and hypertext links software called "Lynx." In order to navigate hypertext links, one could move around the screen via the Tab button or the cursor keys on the keyboard. Once anybody with a computer could simply buy a dialup modem, install some software, dial into an Internet Service Provider (ISP), and use an HTML-compliant browser to navigate to an address called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), the Internet became a popular interactive multi-medium - one which has become ubiquitous today. Because this new multi-medium was built upon technological standards such as Internet Protocol (IP), HTML, and others, every capable person and company was able to produce a Web site with or without streaming video. A new solely interactive "new media" industry was born.

For the next several years, usage of the Internet and a new industry grew. While many people quickly migrated to jobs at Internet companies - because "that's where the money was going" – a few rebellious singular projects hidden from view began to explore the possibilities of ITV while other larger companies began to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to find out if interactive technologies could also be applied to the medium of television.