Open Architecture Television

During the past few years, potentially misdirected effort has been expended developing the notion of high definition television (HDTV) as a system akin to existing television but with approximately twice the spatial resolution horizontally and vertically, and with a slightly higher aspect ratio. System proponents have suggested “production” or distribution systems where the sole difference between current systems and these new ideas is the number of lines and the pixel rate. These efforts have resulted in international discord that may well result in a generation of television systems that impede international interchange of programs, fail to deliver higher quality to the consumer, and retard the technological convergence of computer workstation technology with that of consumer video. In this paper, we suggest that HDTV is an issue of system architecture rather than line count, and we explore signal representations that allow for multiple, simultaneous display of disparate TV standards on the same screen. The notions presented here are not fully developed but are fruitful areas of research and study. We suggest that a new generation of television systems be predicated upon sequential component representation of the video sequence rather than a series of frames and that consumer receivers and workstations be optimized for processing this video format.