Toshiba exec paints detailed picture of HDTV problems

Styling himself as a necessary thorn in the broadcast industry’s side, a Canadian Toshiba executive says digital TV providers are doomed to fail in the HDTV market if they don’t get their act together. Robert Gumiela, senior marketing director for television at Markham ON’s Toshiba of Canada Ltd., took aim at telecommunications service providers for trying to squeeze HDTV signals through too small a network connection, thus providing a downmarket HDTV experience. "How much bandwidth are you delivering to the end user? The best I get is about 2.2 Mbps," Gumiela said during a presentation at The Strategy Institute’s Digital Home Summit, held in Toronto February 21 and 22 and attended by home builders, computer chip makers and communications service providers. "Are they giving us the best? No, they’re giving us crap." Gumiela posited that for a true HDTV experience users should have 54 Mbps – a difficult speed for existing, aging last-mile network infrastructure to provide. "No one to date has said they want to invest in the last mile," Gumiela said, describing the wires that come from the service provider’s infrastructure on the street into the home as the ultimate network bottleneck. He also said the digital television industry as a whole has done a poor job of explaining the benefits of HDTV. Consumers often confuse it with other new video technologies like plasma screens and DVRs. "Ninety percent of people don’t know anything about HDTV. That’s a sad state of affairs. We’ve been in this business for seven years." He pointed to other obstacles before HDTV’s success – shifting revenue models born of pay-per-view, digital rights-management issues for content, and competing technology standards among them. "In the long run we see a possible bright future," he said. Gumiela’s comments got the summit participants talking. Blair Robin, president of digital home system installer Automated Home Technologies of Brampton ON, said HDTV’s obstacles may well be as high as Gumiela described, but that’s no reason to give up on the technology, which is impressive. "It’s like comparing black-and-white to colour. It’s worth it." Neil Johnson, a marketing manager at Regina-based telco SaskTel, said compression technologies do a fine job of bringing HDTV into homes served by communications pipes much smaller than 54 Mbps. SaskTel itself is investing in technologies to boost its network capacity to more than 20 Mbps, and it’s considering rolling out HDTV services, especially as customers turn to competitors for HD service. Gumiela occasionally offered conflicting insights. For instance, while he blamed the broadcast industry for poor HDTV marketing, he also blamed consumers for being stubborn. "The average Joe just doesn’t care" about high picture quality, he said, adding that "The Canadian consumer is a complacent consumer – docile. Asleep at the wheel." Later, however, he said the market for low-priced flat-screen TVs is dying because consumers refuse to purchase devices that provide poor picture quality. Gumiela also said the TV will continue to play a central role in home entertainment, even as computers become more media-friendly. Despite improving picture quality on the average PC as well as marketing efforts by computer makers to turn the device into a home media hub, "there’s video processing in the back of an HDTV set that you would kill to have in a PC," he said, adding that while consumers might be interested in accessing email and the Web from the big screen in the family room, they are not interested in crowding around a PC screen to watch a movie.

Toshiba exec paints detailed picture of HDTV problems

Broadcast | February 24, 2006

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