Panel on High Definition TV Issues

Panel on High Definition TV Issues - Part One

Moderated by Larry Goldberg
Reported by Cheryl Heppner

Editor: At the TDI National Conference in August of 2007 Larry Goldberg moderated a great panel on issues involving High Definition Television (HDTV). Here with her comprehensive report on that panel is NVRC's Cheryl Heppner. You are welcome to share this information, but please be sure to credit NVRC. See the acknowledgement at the end of this article.

This is part one of nine parts.

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Larry Goldberg, the moderator of this panel, is Director of Media Access at WGBH, where he oversees the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), The Caption Center, and Descriptive Video Service. He has been deeply involved in the national and international effort to ensure that design andimplementation of media and information systems address the needs of people with disabilities. He has long been a pioneer and a recognized world expert in the technology, policy and business aspects of making media and technology accessible to all.

Panelists were: Brian Markwater, Consumer Electronics Association; Tony Wilhelm, DTV Converter Box Coupon Program, Department of Commerce - NTIA, Marsha MacBride, Executive Vice President of Legal and Regulatory Affairs, National Association of Broadcasters; Pamela Holmes, Dana Mulvany, and Billy Mauldin, Consumers.

Larry Goldberg:
Yesterday's presentation gave an opportunity to discuss television captioning in general, and it touched a bit on digital. Today we will focus exclusively on digital television, where it came from and where it's going. We'll talk about the upcoming digital television transition, for which there has been concern about how it all is supposed to work.

When captions on HDTV work, it's a wonderful, fantastic experience. The captions are better than ever. We will talk about how we can make that work even more frequently. Each of the panelists will have a few minutes to present from their perspective both the industry aspects and consumer aspects.

History of HDTV and Captioning

I'll give a quick history, just to get us up to today. Discussions began in the early 1990s when the United States decided that we needed to develop a new television system to replace our old analog system. A number of proponent systems were put forward. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asked the proponent systems to get together and pick the best features of all of those systems. They put together what was called the "grand alliance," which eventually became the standard for digital television when the FCC adopted it as a requirement in 1996.

Many things were still left open at that time, but the alliance finally came together with a very robust, excellent and flexible digital television system for the United States.

Also in 1990 te Television Decoder Circuitry Act was passed. It required caption decoders to be built into every analog television set. And with a great deal of skill, the following line was added to the act: "As new video technology is developed, the commission shall take such action as the commission determines appropriate to ensure that closed captioning service continues to be available to consumers." I believe Karen Strauss either takes credit or gives credit to others for having inserted that line into the law, which protects us with today's HDTV and what it needs to do for supporting captioning.

In 1996, the Telecommunications Act was rewritten and in that bill was the requirement for broadcast, cable and satellite television to be captioned. This included digital television captioning. And in the year 2000, the FCC issued their report and order on digital television closed captioning, with the requirements for both the hardware and service.

The July 2000 report and order said that by July 1, 2002, digital television (DTV) sets and tuners and set top boxes must support standard, large and small caption sizes, user selectable or producer selectable, eight fonts, eight captions and background colors, captioning edging, which also included character background translucency, six standard captioning services.

These applied to all DTV receivers, if they were in the old fashioned 4 by 3 aspect ratio, 13 inches, diagonal and larger. If they are in the elongated 16 by 9 format, then those sets, 7.8 inches vertical and larger also had to have the built-in caption decoder circuitry, as well as all DTV tuners with or without displays. We knew at that time much of the technology would be separated, and sometimes the display would be separated from its tuner.

And finally, there was a requirement that programming produced for these digital television sets after July 1, 2002 would have to be closed captioned.

The Results

That resulted in caption windows and sizes, colors and fonts [Displays crisp looking fonts, translucent background, proportional fonts]. These are much better looking captions than we have in the analog world. [Displays a screen shot] This is from one TV set's onscreen menu, where you can select from all of the parameters, or default, so you can reset it back to the standard look. That is what is now required in all of this new digital television equipment.