HDTV: Who Really Needs It?
by Gar Smith

The promise of High Definition TV: sharper images, bigger pictures, increased energy demands, accelerated global warming, loss of broadcast diversity and the subversion of democracy.

Beginning in November, the US government will start requiring all TV stations to shift from analog to digital broadcasting. Forget the "free market" - within five years, anyone who wishes to continue watching "Days of Our Lives" or "60 Minutes" will have to spend several thousand dollars on a new digital TV or a couple hundred dollars on a converter box for an out-moded analog TV.

New High Definition TV (HDTV) equipment will offer bigger, wider pictures and six-channel surround-sound. But is that enough to offset the environmental and social damage HDTV will unleash?

In November, 26 ABC, NBC and CBS affiliate stations are set to go digital with another 40 network stations committed to start digital broadcasts by May 1, 1999. By 2006, all existing TV sets either will have to be replaced with expensive new HDTVs or fitted with costly conversion boxes.

FCC Chairman Bill Kennard seemed concerned but powerless when he addressed HDTV at the National Association of Broadcasters meeting in Las Vegas in January. "No consumer wants to buy five set-top boxes, six remotes and a $6,000 television set that may not work with cable," Kennard declared. Then, invoking the mantra of a couch-potato bureaucrat, Kennard merely promised to "watch the issue closely."

"Digital technology offers viewers the chance for improved pictures and sound," the Associated Press reports. The key word here is "chance" because, in practice, an HDTV picture is either perfect or... nonexistent. If there is a mountain or a tall building between your set and the HDTV antenna, you won't get a fuzzy, out-of-kilter picture: You'll just get a blank screen.

The Big Picture and the Bigger Picture
HDTV is not a technology that TV viewers asked for. HDTV was concocted by a powerful consortium of communications companies called the Grand Alliance - AT&T, Zenith, MIT, General Instrument, Philips Electronics, Thomson Consumer Electronics (RCA) and the Sarnoff Research Center.

The ultimate goal, though, is not "bigger, better pictures." As Jim Barry observed in the April 1997 Stereo Review, FCC approval of HDTV "was a huge step toward having a noncomputer digital pipeline in virtually every American home." As Barry notes, the real potential of this new 19-million-bits-per-second pipeline lies in the new pay-to-use content "that will be developed to take advantage of all the capabilities of the new medium."

For starters, think of it as installing an ATM in every US living room. Business and banks are already planning to offer new HDTV "electronic shopping services." The Association of Interactive Media envisions viewers clicking in the code on their smart cards to browse a screen filled with "home infomercials about specific product[s]." Ultimately, HDTV viewers could "connect to a live service representative for help" in making a purchase. WebTV boxes, manufactured by Philips and Sony, already sport a credit card-reading slot, though the "service" is not now usable by WebTV viewers.

The HDTV system is designed to be "always-on" to promote a new array of interactive services that include home banking, electronic shopping and the remote control of gas, water and electricity meters. According to Margaret Suozzo of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Microsoft and Intel are planning to market "whole house systems" to control and monitor lights, appliances and utilities 24-hours-a-day - ostensibly "to save energy."

Europe Warns of Wasted Watts
In Britain, where digital TV is also set to debut in November, critics - from environmentalists to members of the European Commission - are alarmed by what they see coming.

"When Britain switches to [HDTV] this autumn," the New Scientist reported in February, "it will trigger a surge in power consumption that will eventually rise to 500 megawatts - the output of a new power station." And because HDTVs must be left plugged in 24 hours a day, "household electricity bills will rise by an average of £15 [$??] a year."

The European Commission (EC) and the Dutch Ministry for Economic Affairs were surprised to learn that, in order to continually update control software, HDTV receivers must be left on day and night. The Netherlands Agency for Energy and Environment has warned the EC about the dangers of HDTV but some agency scientists fear it may already be too late to avoid a technological catastrophe. Britain's Consumers' Association has determined that the most efficient HDTV receiver consumes 16 watts in "active standby" mode - 16 times more energy that a traditional analog TV consumes on "passive standby."

By 2005, powering all of Britain's HDTV receivers will require an additional 325 megawatts of electricity. HDTV receiver consume another 10 watts converting the incoming microwave signals into a viewable image. This will require another 175 Mw (whether the TV is turned on or not.)

According to the New Scientist, plugging in all of Britain's new HDTV's will consume "500 megawatts, even when no one is watching anything." This is 1 percent of the UK's current energy needs.

How Much Power? No One Knows
Electronics reporter Alan Sobel, writing in the Scientific American, notes that HDTV requires a 50- to 60-inch diagonal screen and this will mean "a predicted global market for perhaps hundreds of millions of screens worth many billions of dollars." Larger, power-sucking screens mean more global warming. Sobel notes that even today's "power-hungry" cathode-ray tubes are more energy-efficient that any of the proposed new HDTV screens. Japan's HDTV screens are "heavy and inefficient, generating excessive heat along with the light," says Sobel.

Meanwhile, manufacturers are having a hard time getting the big screens to with sufficient brightness for comfortable viewing. "The easiest way of increasing the luminance is to boost the power," Sobel writes, but this "pushes up the cost of the drive circuitry and the power supplies."

HDTV receivers draw? HDTV screens draw?
Existing TVs draw 7-10 watts of power when turned on. Multiplied by 280 million US sets, that's an average of 2,380 megawatts]. Current set-top cable- boxes draw 10-20 watts (another 4,200 megawatts). How much additional energy will be needed to power HDTV receivers, screens satellite antennas and broadcast converters? No one seems to know.

EC scientists and policymakers are concerned that, although the first generation of HDTVs are being built for fall sales, neither manufacturers nor British broadcasters have revealed the technology's service specifications nor given any indications as to whether they can be modified to consume less electricity.

In the US, regulators are even more in the dark. The EPA's "Energy Star" program rates energy efficient refrigerators but an EPA spokesperson told the Journal that TV standards were set by the Department of Energy. The DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency, Codes and Standards, informed the Journal that TVs are a special kind of home appliance. "There are no [TV energy] standards," a DOE spokesperson explained. "There is a 'no standard' standard."

HDTV technology threatens to undermine the US promise - made at the Kyoto climate conference last December - to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases that have caused global warming and thrown the global weather system into chaos. Democracy Be Damned
Some TV station owners were not pleased to learn that they would have to spend $4- to 16 million on HDTV conversion. Cable giant TCI has refused to reduce its number of channels to make room for the wider band-needs of digital TV. People living near proposed HDTV antenna sites are up in arms, as well.

In San Francisco, the 977-foot-tall transmission Mt. Sutro transmission tower (privately owned by a consortium of local TV broadcasters) has long been considered a blight on the landscape. Residents living below the monstrosity were shocked to discover plans to add a 10-ton, 125-foot-long, HDTV antenna to the top of the tower. But when residents tried to challenge the antenna's structural and environmental impacts (it would boost the tower's power output from 15 million to 20 million watts), they were informed that the state's environmental laws do not apply to HDTV antennas.

"Across the country, hundreds of low-power TV stations face losing their channels to [HDTV] stations" San Francisco Chronicle business reporter Jonathan Marshall has noted. As many as a third of these low-power stations are minority- owned. With only 2.8 percent of major US broadcasters are minority-owned, HDTV conversion will drive that slim margin even lower, removing local programming, local news, and the airing of ethnic, noncommercial and progressive voices.

More than 700 low-power stations nationwide could be sacrificed to make room for spectrum-hogging digital broadcasts. In February, the FCC allowed a Hearst-owned station to knock an established low-power operator off the air in Cincinnati. The owner was lucky enough to find a new broadcast channel. But he was forced off the air for a month, had to pay $40,000 for re-engineering and lost half a year's revenues.

In California, HDTV will displace a low-power station in San Francisco featuring local news in Korean and a popular Spanish-language call-in show. Across the country, low power stations carrying both community news, foreign- language news, sports and cultural broadcasts will likely be blown off the air by new HDTV broadcasters.

In place of broadcast diversity, HDTV will inaugurate a new era of corporate broadcast saturation. With HDTV the law of the land, the Global Market will have its "pipeline" plugged into every US livingroom promoting consumption, increasing electric demand and accelerating the environmental burdens on our beleaguered planet.

What You Can Do: Write the FCC, contact Congress. Demand an investigation of the environmental and energy impacts of HDTV. Demand the reinstitution of the Office of Technology Assessment (this effective and highly-praised agency was destroyed by the GOP during the "deregulation" onslaught of the Reagan presidency). And most importantly, don't be taken in by the hype: Refuse to buy into the new HDTV "revolution." Don't Buy HDTV!