Open Mike

Editor: How disappointing that CBS has decided to drop its membership in the National Association of Broadcasters. When will we stop cutting off our collective nose to spite our face?

The NAB is the one trade association that speaks for all of broadcasting. There are still issues that need one unified voice, such as lowest-unit-rate advertising, censorship, electronic coverage of federal courts, copyright issues—the list goes on.

There are plenty of other issues where different factions will disagree. For that reason, there are dozens of other trade associations to represent those more narrow interests.

CBS (and the others who have jumped ship) would be better served to remain members of the NAB, while creating another trade association to represent their more specific interests.

Broadcasters would be wise to remember the words of Benjamin Franklin: "We must all hang together, or we will all hang separately."

—Dom Caristi, associate professor, telecommunications, Ball State University, Muncie, Ind., http://home.bsu.edu/home/dgcaristi

Editor: I'm becoming convinced that something very much like the broadcast tech center, which you discussed in your column (Harry A. Jessell, "R&D to the Rescue," March 26) and which seems to be fostered by MSTV and NAB, is a good and perhaps necessary idea.

But we as an industry shouldn't make the mistake of letting this idea be politicized like CableLabs, the ATTC or the WHD project have been.

What is needed is not theoretical, impractical and meaningless demonstrations like WHD did for years, but a place where real broadcast engineers with lots of experience in the trenches can develop, document and disseminate real solutions to digital implementation that can be replicated by real broadcasters out in the hinterlands. Right this second, it is obvious to me that most stations are inventing it as they go and making significant and costly mistakes.

In the end, it's not the numbers or theory that counts; it's that we get pictures on the air and keep them there and that we do this at a price the industry can afford to pay.

—Tom Mann, Los Angeles

Editor: I read with great interest Harry Jessell's column proposing a broadcast tech center, and I couldn't agree more.

By way of background, you should be aware that, toward the end of the testing of the DTV transmission systems at the Advanced Television Test Center (ATTC), then-Chairman Joel Chaseman asked the board of directors to fund a study to determine the feasibility of turning the ATTC from its limited purpose of testing advanced television transmission systems to a full-blown technology center.

Its purpose would be to test new equipment and to tackle what everyone knew would be a host of technical issues as the industry implemented this new technology.

The board agreed, and Paul Bortz was hired to look at a variety of then-existing models, including CableLabs, to determine whether they had applicability to the broadcasting industry.

Paul presented his report. Unfortunately, there was insufficient support among the members to push this forward, and it was dropped.

While ATTC still exists as a technology center, it is not focused on the kinds of issues that address the critical needs of the broadcasting industry and does not solely represent its interests.

Unlike the past, in which research centers like Sarnoff Labs and CBS Labs took apart new equipment and provided the manufacturers with direct and specific feedback on broadcasters needs and evaluations, as well as developing new and innovative responses to technical problems, the industry is now left at the mercy of the manufacturers and the financial exposure that can result from uninformed decisions.

In the long run, I believe that a broadcast-industry technology lab would save the industry millions of dollars, far more than its annual budget, by providing critical advice and information to its members and solving problems like 8-VSB implementation.

It's not too late.

—Joseph Widoff, executive vice president and COO, WETA-TV Washington, and former vice president of the Advanced Television Test Center (1990-95)

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