HDTV Over Telephone Lines?

[Jerry Jones]

Fascinating. Click on link:
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/H...azzletter5.htm

Prediction from Charlie White of Digital
Media Net:

>Finally -- and this is the biggest
>one of all -- I predict a major
>breakthrough in compression
>technology, and I mean a major,
>earthshaking, ultra-wow leap.
>High definition TV signals will
>suddenly be able to be sent through
>regular phone lines, and the
>technology will all be done with
>software. It's going to change the
>DV world as we know it. This will
>happen, and you'll see it by this
>spring's NAB. Trust me on this one.
>Charlie White
>cwhite@digitalmedianet.com

[Elie]

Here's my Predictions for the future..READY..?

1-ADSL will run at 10mbps

2-Voice over IP will be available to the home user.

3-Video on demand over phone lines will be availaible also.

4-we will have 2 way satelite communicatios for internet access and cell phones.

Besides Jerry, who's working on HDTV over voice lines?
I would like to buy their stock

[Jerry Jones]

Well, Elie, I would like to know
myself which company is working on
HDTV over phone lines because if
Charlie White's prediction is true...
and we'll see this new software by
NAB in the Spring... it really will
be an *astonishing* leap.

My question would be: What will happen
to "broadcasting" as we know it, currently?

Why would I want to use a conventional
TV set that picks up a VHF TV signal
when I can get HDTV over a telephone line?

Moreover, why would I wish to produce
video for a TV broadcast outlet when
I can produce video instead for a content-
buyer who transmits my video over phone
lines?

The implications of this are incredible--
if true.

[DrMordrid]

When I read that article a few days ago I almost fell off my chair. He isn't usually prone to overt excitement which gives this a bit more credence.

I wonder what kind of performance that code would have once burned into silicon? C-Cube and Zoran might have a problem, unless one of them is the instigator....

Dr. Mordrid

[paulw]

ADSL currently requires you to be 3KM from the telephone central office. If you want HDTV on the same pair of copper then you will have to be next door to the CO unless they come up with some wonderfull compression technology that ignores the limitation of copper cable.

[jeff b]

I wonder if this might have anything to do with fractal geometry, and the kind of stuff that's been pioneered by Iterated Systems in Atlanta http://www.iterated.com/

All their stuff has so far been dealing with still images, as far as I can see. For instance, algorhythms using a fractal paradigm have been employed in machines that reconstruct video images that are too indistinct to otherwise work with. This stuff is used by law enforcement to take, for instance, a tiny part of a video frame with someone's face. It's too small on the frame to make anything out. But with this stuff developed partially by Iterated, using fractal based algorhythms, they can actually reconstruct what the face PROBABLY looked like. It's really quite amazing. The whole thing about fractals is that there is the potential for INFINITE compression in theory. In practice, things haven't always worked out to such absolutes, but have, nonetheless, led things down a very interesting road. I've been wondering when this whole paradigm for compression might get focused upon moving images, too...

I stumbled onto all of this when I saw a television documentary narrated by Arthur C. Clarke a couple of years ago. It was on PBS here in the States, and was entitled 'The Colors of Infinity.' Featured heavily in this documentary was one of the founders of Iterated Systems, a mathemetician whose name I don't recall at the moment... Anyway, the main focus of the documentary was about what Mandelbrott came up with, the mathematical formulas for fractals. The interesting thing about Mandelbrott was that he had some idea what he had discovered, but it wasn't until the last couple of decades that anyone was able to actually SHOW what a truly amazing thing this really was, because what it deals with is something that can truly be infinite in either direction! Consequently, one needed a decent computer to really SHOW that this was the case, and this didn't come about until after 1980.

So, with a basic mathematical formula that reveals an infinite expansion, and an infinite contraction, the next step was to attempt to apply this to the storage of images on computers. Theoretically, one should be able to fully reproduce an extremely high resolution image from the data that can be stored in just a few hundred bytes. There's no reason why this same thing can't be applied to moving images, too.

[Jerry Jones]

I'm thinking this Spring I'll head
down to Vegas to check this rumor
out.

It sounds too good to be true, but
Doc is right---Charlie White isn't
one to blow things out of proportion.

If this software proves to be other
than vaporware... it indeed will change
the DV world as we know it.

[gibverse]

Video over phone lines will almost definatly be implemented using VDSL. This is ADSL's kid brother designed for delivering video and other large sized content. US West did a trial run in the southwest US last fall, with good results using standard TV, so if some tweaking was done to the VDSL technology, and some better compression added to the video stream, we may not be far off at all.

See http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...l?tag=st.cn.1.
for info about the US West VDSL trial.

John


[This message has been edited by gibverse (edited 19 January 2000).]