From The New York Times
July 12, 1999

Broadcaster Seeks Change in Digital TV Format
By JOEL BRINKLEY

WASHINGTON -- It seems to be a hopeless, quixotic mission.

The nation's transition to digital television is now in its ninth month,
and more than 70 television stations nationwide have begun broadcasting on
their digital channels. Hundreds more have placed orders for digital
transmission equipment. At the same time, as many as 40,000 consumers have
bought expensive new digital television sets.

Nonetheless, Sinclair Broadcast Group, a maverick company that owns or
operates 59 television stations nationwide, is waging an audacious campaign
to revise the digital format, saying the current version is seriously
flawed. If Sinclair succeeds, much of the brand-new equipment broadcasters
and consumers have already purchased will be rendered obsolete, like the
Betamax VCRs or quadraphonic audio systems of decades past.

Television stations would have to replace portions of their digital
transmitters with a new piece of circuitry that costs as much as $50,000.
And thousands of consumers would find that their digital television
receivers no longer worked.

It is too early to know if the Sinclair campaign will succeed. Still, Bruce
Franca, deputy chief of the Federal Communications Commission's engineering
and technology office, said: "It certainly makes you step back and think.
But I'm not sure it's enough to convince us that we made a mistake."

With recent purchases, Sinclair now owns or operates more television
stations than any other company. And by the beginning of November,
according to the FCC's timetable, 13 of the Sinclair stations must begin
digital broadcasting. The company says it plans to meet that deadline, even
though its leaders say they stumbled on a serious problem with the nation's
digital television standard last summer.

Sinclair engineers were running transmission tests and found to their
surprise that when they were working inside city buildings they could not
reliably receive a viewable digital picture.

"We did some more tests, and we saw that something was seriously wrong,"
Nat Ostroff, a Sinclair vice president, said. And now the company is on a
campaign to have the transmission system changed to one that is used in
Europe and has been shown to work better in urban environments. For the
past two weeks, Sinclair has been staging compelling demonstrations of the
two systems in Baltimore, near the company's headquarters. Dozens of
broadcasters, government officials and others have come by to see.

Digital broadcasts are supposed to provide for sharper pictures and
CD-quality sound, and to allow for the creation of new types of
computerlike add-on services still to be invented. But Sinclair contends
that technical limits of the current format could cripple the nascent
market.

Defenders of the existing transmission system, however, say the Sinclair
tests are flawed because they simply stress the advantages of the European
system without addressing the trade-offs and disadvantages.

"Sure, the demonstration looks great; but they're using first-generation
equipment," said Richard Lewis, a senior vice president with Zenith
Electronics Corp., which invented the current U.S. transmission system. He
said the American industry was continually improving the technology though
subsequent generations of equipment.

"This is an issue everyone in the industry is working on," Lewis said.
"We've made improvements already and will continue to -- very quickly."

During the many years of development, the consortium of companies that
created the nation's digital television standard ran exhaustive tests of
their own to determine whether transmissions would remain robust and
viewable at extended distances.

Five years ago, in Charlotte, N.C., a city with varied terrain, the testers
outfitted a truck with an outdoor television antenna attached to a boom
they could raise from the truck's roof. Over many months, they drove all
over town, parked at the side of the road, raised the antenna 30 feet and,
using equipment in the cab, checked to see if they could receive a digital
signal broadcast from in town. Overall, the system performed magnificently.

In the following years, similar tests were run in other cities, including
New York, and all produced successful results showing that, with a rooftop
antenna, the system works quite well. But until now, no one had run an
organized series of tests indoors, using inexpensive indoor antennas. And
as it turns out, using the consumer-grade digital television receivers
currently available in stores, in many urban, indoor locations the system
fails.

The problem is multipath distortion. Inside buildings, particularly, a
television antenna picks up signals from many angles. One signal comes
straight from the transmitting tower, while another comes from a different
direction after it bounces off other structures. These signals do not
necessarily arrive simultaneously, confusing the receiver.

With conventional television receivers, this problem can cause annoying
"ghosts" in the picture. But in many cases, digital receivers simply fail
altogether.

For the demonstrations under way now, Sinclair is broadcasting a full-power
digital signal from the company's Baltimore television station and
comparing the American and European systems. And with visitors in tow, they
are hauling digital receivers and test equipment to parking decks,
apartment buildings, offices and other urban locations. Then they turn
everything on and hold up two antennas: a "bow tie" type for indoor use of
the sort distributed with most television sets, and a slightly more
sophisticated table-top model purchased at Radio Shack for $16.99.

Last Wednesday, Ostroff and several other Sinclair engineers ran
demonstrations for a group of visiting broadcasters, and the first stop was
the fifth floor of an open parking deck in the middle of town (chosen to
simulate the reception inside an urban apartment or office building, while
allowing the engineers to drive right in).

They pulled out their receivers and held up the two cheap antennas, perched
atop a short aluminum pole. And while the visitors clustered around, the
Sinclair personnel called the station on a cell phone and asked the
engineers there to broadcast first with the American system and then with
the European alternative.

With the American system, the television monitor displayed a picture only
when the antenna was carefully aimed and held perfectly still. Even then, a
car driving past or a hand waved in front of the antenna would disrupt the
signal, and the digital receiver boxes would black out, showing the
messages "channel not available" or "tuning failed." But when the
transmission system was switched to the European system, the signal came in
clear and clean with no difficulty and little interference.

The traveling show then moved to an apartment building and was set up in
the apartment of a Sinclair sales manager who was away on vacation. His
television room faced Baltimore's Inner Harbor, while the television
transmitter was in the opposite direction, a prescription for multipath
distortion.

And sure enough, the results were even more lopsided, causing one of the
broadcasters to note with a shake of the head, "You have to work to find a
signal" with the American system, "and you have to work to lose it" with
the other.

At other times, the tests have been run in a variety of city locations,
even down on the sidewalk, but the results are always the same.

Sinclair is campaigning to persuade the government to scrap the present
transmission system and substitute the European alternative. David Smith,
chief executive of the company, says it would be "a minor change" -- just a
circuit board in the digital transmitters that would cost no more than
$50,000 to swap.

As for consumers who have already purchased digital receivers, "I can't
imagine that the broadcasting industry would back away from buying a few
thousand new TV sets for these people," Smith said. "It's worth the price
to get a system that can allow us to survive as over-the-air broadcasters."

But Robert Graves, who runs the Advanced Television Systems Committee, an
industry organization that codifies broadcast standards, said the change
would be significantly more complicated and require three years of testing
and analysis. "This is hardly a trivial matter," he said.

Smith says he plans to ask other station group owners to sign a petition to
be presented to the FCC, which has not taken a stand on the debate. If the
FCC does not respond, Smith added, "Then we will go to Congress," which has
shown itself to be open to entreaties from the broadcast industry.

But Smith may have trouble enlisting a large group of broadcasters. Lynn
Claudy, a senior vice president with the National Association of
Broadcasters, saw the Sinclair demonstration and said he found it
impressive, though "it is highly dependent on those first-generation
receivers they used." But he said his organization had not heard from other
broadcasters saying they wanted to revise the standard.

Joe Widoff, a senior vice president with WETA, a public television station
in Washington, visited Sinclair and concluded that "the evidence, on its
face, it pretty hard to refute."

Nonetheless, he added, echoing others: "I don't really know what it means.
And I am extremely reluctant at this point to blow this whole thing up."