While the Federal Communications Commission's HDTV committee mulls over which of three leading HDTV broadcast standards to adopt, the computer industry, led by DEC and Apple, has made it clear that they are not happy with any of them. They argue that many of the technical specifications of the three candidates are digitally illiterate, including the use of interleaving (breaking each frame into two fields); non-square pixels (which do not allow easy manipulation) and proprietary requirements for de-coding signals. Instead, the computer industry feels that a progressive scanning, square-pixeled, non-proprietary decoding scheme will provide substantial long-term benefits to both the television industry, as it moves into high-bandwidth interactive television, and the computer industry, which could provide hardware for the new market.
At the National Association of Broadcasters convention, John Sculley of Apple urged broadcasters to forget HDTV and move toward digital television, which would allow true interactivity.
Anxious to provide hundred-channel systems using a HDTV compression standard, the TV industry argues that the computer industry ideas are great for the long term, but in the short term they need to meet consumer demand for HDTV with known technology and available digital production equipment (especially from Sony). The computer industry has replied that it can demonstrate, by this summer, that it has a much better and more viable digital standard than any of the present contenders. Don't touch that dial.
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