Sky names suppliers for HDTV service

High Definition Television (HDTV) has been causing a
stir in the US for some time and many of us a clamouring for the European
version. BSkyB has been making plans to launch the service in the near future
and in a step towards that end has now named some of the technology and
equipment suppliers. Sony has been contracted to start the and equipping of a
new HDTV studio in Sky’s Isleworth headquarters, Tandberg Television will
assume command of video encoding and distribution, and the Harris D-Series Version 4 Air Automation
System will support delivery of BSkyB’s HDTV programming

Although HDTV has been heralded as the future of television,
a recent Guardian feature suggests that some viewers might feel slightly let
down by the commercial reality of the system when launched. To view the new
channels will require some serious hardware upgrades; firstly in the Sky boxes,
which will have the new High Definition
Multimedia Interface (HDMI) outputs, this means that, in turn, your
telly will also have to be “HDTV Ready”. To achieve that will require both an
HDMI input (although Sky boxes will still have an analogue output – it just
won’t look as good) and special software to handle High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), which is Sky’s
way of maintaining copyright over the service.

Which is all well
and good unless you have splashed out on a LCD or Plasma TV, say in the last
year, in which case it probably won’t support the new service. Further more,
experts suggest that due to the sheer cost of transmitting the new programmes,
they are likely to be capped at 720 lines; this is still an improvement over
PAL’s normal 576 visible lines, but still way short of the 1080 lines the
system is capable of.

In its infancy, HDTV isn’t going to dramatically
change your life but it certainly is here to stay and puts Sky at the forefront
of the next generation of TV transmissions for the foreseeable future.