Our feisty old analog NTSC TV standard won't go down without a fight

by Eric K. Gill

This is the year videophiles have all been waiting for: HDTV broadcasts are scheduled to begin by the end of 1998. Of course, there's a great deal of skepticism surrounding the new digital transmission standard, and whether or not advanced television broadcasts will occur this year remains to be seen. One thing is certain, however: Our existing NTSC standard has a lot of life left in it At 56 years old, NTSC has at least eight years to go before it's ready for retirement- and probably a lot more, if history repeats itself. To understand why, let's review the birth and adolescence of our faithful National Television Systems Committee standard.

The basic mathematic principles of our current broadcast standard were implemented in 1941. That was the year the FCC adopted the NTSC recommendations for a 525-line interlaced signal consisting of 59.94 fields per second. The interlaced scanning technique was developed by a team of engineers at RCA to suppress flicker. Interlaced scanning requires that two fields of scan lines-odd and even-be combined to create a single frame, with one frame displayed every 1/30th of a second. Most experts agree that NTSC is an ingenious encode/decode system, because it retains nearly 100 percent of the original signal. Although competing PAL and SECAM systems adopted by European countries offer 625 lines at 25 frames per second, they're actually less efficient than NTSC.

Color Comes Online In 1953, the NTSC system was modified to incorporate color-with one extremely important condition: The new system had to be compatible with black-and-white television sets-and for good reason. By 1953, television had captivated the American public. Sales of black-and-white TVs increased 500 percent from 1947 to 1948; from 1948 to 1952, they jumped from 250,000 to 17 million a year. Since a television set was considered a major expense, the FCC insisted that the new standard be backward compatible with the old standard.

This decision effectively gave the networks less incentive to produce programs in color. Although CBS experimented with color broadcasting in 1951, it wasn't until 1958 that NBC began limited broadcasting using the new NTSC-color standard-and it took another eight years for all three major networks to complete the transition to color broadcasting. In fact only half of the TV sets in U.S. homes in 1972 were color. It took 20 years, therefore, for the new color standard to penetrate 50 percent of U.S. households.

On the one hand, it can be argued that had the FCC not mandated backward compatibility with black-and-white TVs, color broadcasting would have occurred much sooner. On the other hand, it can be argued that consumers who purchased black-and-white TVs prior to the advent of the new NTSC-color standard deserved fair consideration. This is an important point because we are in the midst of a similar, if more complicated, transition.

The Birth of Digital Our existing NTSC standard is analog. Although the transition from color to black-and-white broadcasting was a major technical achievement, it pales in comparison to the digital television standard recommended by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) and adopted by the FCC on December 24,1996.

Suffice it to say that the new Advanced TV format is an extremely robust system that will not only bring broadcasting into the digital domain, thus promoting all kinds of interactive and data-rich material, but will also deliver high-resolution images and multichannel surround sound. (See "Inside Digital TV.") Time will tell whether the new standard tries to do too much. But for now, there are other more important questions to ask, such as: How much will digital TVs cost? When will we see a proliferation of high-definition programs? And, the most important question of all: When will today's analog sets become obsolete? Unfortunately, we don't really know the answers to the first two questions. But we can take a good guess about the answer to the last one.

In early 1997, the FCC mandated that broadcasters would be loaned a second channel during a transition period. This would allow them to transmit both digital and analog signals, so that existing sets could continue to decode NTSC signals. That transition period was originally set to expire in 2006, with the FCC announcing publicly that it might extend the date if it appeared that consumers were not yet ready to abandon the old standard. Then, last summer, the House Commerce Committee passed a budget amendment that would allow broadcasters to keep their current analog channels past the 2006 deadline in markets where 15 percent or more of U.S. households weren't receiving digital channels. Although pundits speculate that Congress is kowtowing to the lobbying efforts of broadcasters, the historical precedent established by the transition from black and white to color would indicate that Congress does, in fact, have consumers' best interests at heart. Republican Representative W.J. Tauzin of Louisiana captured Washington's sentiments when he told the L.A. Times, "Congress is not about to order lights out on analog broadcasting while there is a significant segment of the American public capable of receiving it."

Time on your Side Of course, on close consideration, that 15 percent threshold is misleading. Contrary to popular belief, the amendment doesn't call for 85 percent market penetration of digital TVs; only for 85 percent of TV households to be receiving the programming sent over the new digital broadcast channels. Somewhere around 65 percent of U.S. households currently subscribe to cable systems that are expected to deliver that programming to their subscribers in either digital or analog form in a fairly short time frame. That's a big chunk of your 85 percent right there. The 35 percent remainder is a mix of direct-to-home satellite subscribers, many of whom rely on off-air terrestrial broadcasts to get local stations, and those households that don't subscribe to any pay-TV service and thus get all their TV from off-air analog broadcasts.

Therefore, reaching the threshold requires only about two-thirds of the 35 percent of homes not presently hooked to cable to either subscribe to cable, or to purchase a digital TV or a converter box that will allow them to view digital broadcast signals on their analog NTSC set. But consider who those people are. Most families who don't now subscribe to cable choose not to because they can't afford it or because they just don't watch enough TV to warrant the expense. That won't change with digital TV: These homes will still lack either the incentive or the finances to step up to cable, or to buy an expensive new digital set In fact, the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association predicts that only 30 percent of U.S. homes will have digital TVs by the FCC's 2006 target date for turning off the analog channels. It's a good guess that only a small portion of those DTV purchasers will be among the cable holdouts described above.

The bottom line? The slow transition to color TV from black and white suggests that once people have some form of TV, they can be awfully slow to adopt new enhancements like DTV. Most will wait until the TV they have today breaks down before buying a new one. Getting those last few reticent households required to meet the threshold for turning off analog is likely to take longer, perhaps considerably longer, than the eight or nine years leading up to the FCC's 2006 deadline. So if you're in the market today for an NTSC analog TV, don't fret about it going dark anytime soon. We'll probably be living with NTSC television, living in the past, as it were - for many years to come.