Even as industry insiders question the likelihood of u.s. broadcasters meeting a 2002 deadline to be fully operational in digital television, Canada is showing signs that it is picking up speed on the road to dtv.

Canadian Digital Television, an organization created to help guide Canadian broadcasters and policy-makers toward dtv, began running tests in mid-November, one of several tangible steps in Canada’s emergence in the digital tv realm.

Located on the CHUM/CTV Tower in Manotick, Ont., outside Ottawa, the transmitter is testing a second-generation Motorola decoder chip for a receiver antenna, says cdtv president Michael McEwen.

Experiments this fall will test whether the coverage pattern of the digital transmission is the same as the analog pattern to make sure broadcasters can duplicate their areas. cdtv will also undertake picture-quality testing, encoder testing and bit-rate testing, and look at the allotment plan of various frequencies, McEwen says. Public demonstrations will begin in the spring.

The tests are one of the strongest indications yet that Canada has begun the long march to digital in earnest.

Another came in late October when Bell ExpressVu demonstrated the first commercial transmission of high-definition tv programming in Canada. ExpressVu says it will broadcast a few hours a month of hdtv – wide-screen digital tv with the highest available picture quality and Dolby 5.1 digital audio – via its pay-per-view service Vu!

‘Not to start spending money to position yourself, to be able to converge, is running the risk that when the time’s right, you’re not competitive because you haven’t done anything to plan it, or the cost is huge,’ McEwen says.

More questions

than answers

But while Canada has seen some movement forward, there remain still more questions about the inevitability of dtv than answers.

The number one issue is will all u.s. broadcasters be up and running digital signals by the 2002 deadline imposed by the Federal Communications Commission?

Canada has adopted a wait-and-see strategy for the move to digital, which allows the nation’s broadcasters to learn from the u.s. experience and move forward more slowly.

Under fcc rules, all u.s. broadcasters will shut down analog feeds in 2006, provided that 85% of households have access to digital feeds.

Last month, however, one u.s. organization, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, filed a petition with the fcc to amend its rule which adopts the 8-Level Vestigial Sideband (8VSB) standard, and called for the inclusion of one being touted in Europe. Sinclair representatives say the Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (cofdm) standard is superior and broadcasters should be given a choice between it and 8VSB.

Based on a series of tests it conducted, Sinclair says it may be easier for homes to receive dtv signals using the cofdm standard. This, they say, will benefit broadcasters that use part of their signal to send data and other information.

But the Advanced Television Systems Committee, the coalition of u.s. manufacturers and tv industry representatives who recommended the current digital system, says it would take years of testing to make sure cofdm does not interfere with existing analog and 8VSB signals.

‘There are advantages and disadvantages,’ McEwen says of the two standards. ‘For Canada, it doesn’t really matter what the standard is, we’ll go with whatever the American standard is.’

Some industry observers say Sinclair’s efforts are simply a stall tactic because of the high costs necessary to bring its 57 television stations up to fcc standards by the end of 2002.

But several other tv station owners have joined the Sinclair bid and it has left the whole issue in doubt.

‘It’s kind of thrown a wrench into the works,’ says Allan Morris, vp engineering at ctv. ‘I guess one of the difficulties in going dtv, hdtv, is how are you going to pay for it? Is the advertiser going to pay more? Probably not.’

Morris says developments such as the Sinclair petition only add to a long list of questions that need to be answered before ctv is ready to put a business plan on the table for digital conversion.

At the top of his list is how realistic is 2006 as the date when u.s. broadcasters will shut down analog. To shut down the ntsc (analog) standard is to risk alienating a portion of the population which can’t afford or doesn’t want hdtv. That, Morris says, does not make smart business sense.

‘How can you shut it off?’ he asks. ‘How can you shut off the existing system?

‘It becomes an economic issue, as well. What percentage of the population can actually afford this? You’re not going to shut down ntsc unless someone can go buy a $300 [hd] television set at Future Shop,’ he says, pointing out that current prices for hdtv sets can be at least $5,000.

‘Realistically, they’re not going to shut off x percent of the population and say, sorry, you can now no longer get reception….I don’t even think they’re going to attempt it.’

Still, cdtv statistics show that 40,000 hdtv-ready sets had been sold in the States by the end of June and u.s. networks are broadcasting 100 hours of hd programming weekly. There are 79 stations on the air transmitting dtv signals, covering 60% of the u.s. population.

Doug Bonar, vp technology and broadcast operations at CanWest Global, remains cautious, if a little more optimistic than Morris.

While Bonar agrees that 2006 is ‘unrealistic, totally,’ as a cut-off date to shut down analog, he does see the day coming when dtv is received by a large portion of homes – perhaps by 2010. ‘That would be the earliest I would see it,’ he says. ‘And I can see analog [go] way beyond that.’

But does CanWest have a business plan in place for when that day finally comes? ‘Nobody has,’ he says. ‘I don’t believe one exists for anybody. If anybody tells you they’ve got a business plan, they’re dreaming.’

Still, ctv and CanWest continue to upgrade to digital as the need arises so as not to be caught flat-footed once the public is ready to receive digital broadcasts.

Morris says ctv’s 24-hour SportsNet, which went on the air last year, is a completely digital facility that can broadcast in wide-screen, though not in hd.

‘If we said we are going to build a new facility because the other one is either out of date, unreliable or cannot meet the production demands, then you’d put digital in,’ he says. ‘That’s what drives us to put digital in, not throwing out equipment that works for the sake of being digital.’

cdtv’s McEwen says this approach is the only prudent one until the u.s. has worked out all the issues. ‘If you develop a strategy now that says, ‘Well, I’m going to replace my obsolete analog piece of equipment in editing, replace it with a digital piece of equipment that also will allow me to do a wide-screen pass-through,’ that’s just smart thinking.’

Then, he says, down the road broadcasters will remain competitive in both the pictures and sound they can offer viewers, plus their ability to create value-added services such as program-associated data.

Bandwidth, reception issues

Another question on the lips of broadcasters is, ‘Where will we find all the necessary satellite bandwidth to facilitate dual broadcasts in standard and hd?’

‘What about all the specialty channels where there is very limited satellite capacity? If you start doing hd, real hd, there won’t be enough bandwidth available,’ Morris says.

u.s. research has also indicated problems receiving 8VSB signals by antenna indoors and in areas with obstacles such as buildings and mountains. Many homes in the u.s. still receive tv signals via antenna and the atsc standard was established to initially be transmitted in this way.

In Canada, this issue is of less concern because there is much higher level of cable penetration.

This, however, raises another question. Cable companies have yet to demonstrate that they can provide enough bandwidth to transmit dual hdtv/ntsc signals via cable for a full range of programming.

Unless Canadians from coast to coast are willing to climb up to their roofs and install antennas to receive hdtv, the only suitable providers of the medium will remain the direct-to-home satellite distributors until cable works out a solution.

But headway is being made. Earlier this month, Rogers Communications tested a Scientific-Atlanta hd set-top box, which is said to be able to decode high-definition signals.

Rogers, in fact, fed two hd signals onto one channel, says Roger Keay, vp of technology and strategic planning at Rogers.

‘In other words, the channel could have either carried one ntsc analog signal, or a bunch of standard-definition [digital] signals, or, in this case, we used it to carry two high-definition signals and we had some space left over.’

Keay says he is confident that cable will be ready to broadcast what is expected initially to be a limited number of hd signals.

‘When hd is ready to happen in Canada, we don’t think we will be in the way of it happening, let’s put it that way,’ he says. ‘Cable’s ability to distribute hd, I don’t think is an issue.’

Bonar of CanWest Global agrees. He believes cable should be ready to facilitate a full menu of hd broadcasts when the time comes, as will the nation’s broadcasters.

‘If we don’t build the system, no one will buy the receivers. [But] the receivers are very expensive, so there has to be [some] high-quality information on the screen for someone to make this move.’

But until that kind of programming is available, in other words, hd, it’s an investment with no return.