If you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re kind of obsessed. See, we like to just sit and look at A/V equipment even when it’s turned off. We just love looking at turned-off HDTVs, especially the backs where all the many ports and connectors are located. Normal people, like you, probably want to actually look at an HDTV program, not an inert HDTV. OK, so we can’t fault you there. A couple of years ago, however, we would have shaken our heads sadly and told you there were none to be found. Today, however, there’s an ever-increasing amount of HDTV programming available programming that will elicit the appropriate oohs and ahhs from people visiting your house. In this part, we expose you to various ways you can get high-definition content onto your HDTV. We start with a general look at the signals available from the over-the-air broadcasters, cable companies, and satellite companies. We reveal why not all signals look the same from these sources even if they’re broadcasting the same movie. Different sources have different compression and transmission capabilities. They all look great. But some will look greater than others. Then we drill down on each of the three major originators of HDTV signals, starting with the over-the-air broadcasters. We can thank the FCC for prodding the TV stations in the direction of HDTV, but really thank the HDTV manufacturers for making displays inexpensive enough to drive HDTVs into lots of homes giving the TV stations rationale to move to more digital programming.

We tell you probably more than you want to know about HDTV antennae, and how to optimize your connections to the OTA (over-the-air) folks. Then we do the same with the cable industry, looking at how the cable firms are positioning to deliver highdefinition cable programming. We tell you about the way HDTV signals are encoded and decoded, and the role of your analog and digital set top boxes. We also tell you about the new CableCARD capability that you are going to start seeing in HDTV devices. We wrap up the HDTV programming discussion with a look at satellite programming firms and what they can offer. In addition to talking about DirecTV and DISH (the two big guys), we also explore the latest player in satellite-based programming, VOOM. We walk you through what’s available, how to upgrade to HD satellite service if you’re already a customer, and even how to combine satellite service with Internet access. Whew, that’s a lot! Aren’t you glad you came here first!

Who’s Showing HDTV? In the vein of “all dressed up and nowhere to go,” HDTVs would be no good without content to show on them native, highdefinition content, that is. Hollywood has done its usual: “If there’s a place to put the content, we’ll come out with it.” And the manufacturers have said, “If you make the content, we’ll build the systems.” Lucky for us, DVDs and higher-definition camcorders have created a lot of reasons to want higher-resolution TVs, and that has prompted the broadcasters to follow suit with their own HDTV content. Broadcast TV stations, for example, are heeding the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and beginning HDTV broadcasts. Cable companies are offering at least some HDTV programming (and usually not just “some” programming but “a lot”) in most of their major markets. And satellite providers are offering HDTV to pretty much the entire United States so almost no one is outside the “footprint” of HDTV these days. In this article, we take a high-level look at who’s offering HDTV, what it takes to get the service, and what kind of HDTV content you can get from the different providers. That last item can be important to know if, for example, you bought your HDTV specifically to watch The Final Four (we predict a big Duke run next year!) or for seeing Tony and Carmela in the utmost detail on The Sopranos. In the three articles that follow in this part of the article, we get into a lot more detail about broadcast, cable, and satellite HDTV the programming, its availability, and the equipment requirements. Consider those discussions in this article a quick, up-front primer move forward in the article when you’re looking for the details.

Looking at Who Has HDTV We’re in the midst of HDTV-mania. If you happened to have a dead cat handy (and no, we’re not cat haters! We love cats, and don’t want them dead, unless they’ve been very, very bad kitties), you wouldn’t be able to swing it very far before you hit an ad for HDTV sets, HDTV programming, HDTV services from a cable company, or something HDTV. This situation makes us happy. We’ve been going to the CES (the Consumer Electronics Show the biggest HDTV-related trade show there is) every year for a long time. And every year we hear, “This year, this year, is the Year of HDTV!” Well, we’ve finally reached that point in what must be the fifth or sixth official “Year of HDTV” (YOH for short). Thank goodness. The reason we know that it’s now YOH is the sheer volume of HDTV programming that’s become available from different sources, and the profusion of ways the average person can now access that programming. Broadcasters One group of TV providers who have begun to really see the light is the broadcast networks (such as ABC and CBS) and local affiliate stations that broadcast the network content over the airwaves. This hasn’t happened purely because the broadcast folks are being good TV citizens. It’s because the FCC has mandated a transition from analog to digital TV.

Eventually, all of these broadcasters will need to turn off their analog signals and send out DTV broadcasts (note that we said DTV, not HDTV lower-resolution 480p or even 480i signals can be broadcast). It’s not all pressure from the FCC, however, that is driving this. Broadcast networks are increasingly competing with what we’ll call cable networks though it’s a bit of a misnomer, we use this term to describe networks you can only get via cable or satellite (such as HBO or TNT). Broadcasting in HDTV especially for big-ticket items like prime-time shows and major-league sporting events gives the broadcast networks a leg up on cable networks (many of which are still stuck in Analog TV Land). Four of the five major broadcast networks (that would be ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and the WB) are broadcasting at least some HDTV content. As we write, Fox is the lone holdout, but it promises HDTV by the time this article hits the shelves. The best thing about broadcast network HDTV (often called OTA, or over-the-air) is that it’s free. Free as in free beer. No cost to you (except maybe having to watch some bad ads). All you need is an HDTV with a built-in or external tuner, and an antenna. In Article 8 we give you some more detail on this. Cable and satellite networks The cable networks (the networks you can’t get with a rabbit-ear antenna) have not been sitting around idly while broadcast networks began to send out this free HDTV to their viewers. In fact, many cable networks have developed and launched their own high-definition channels ranging from movie channels (such as HBO or Showtime High Def) to sports channels like ESPN-HD. The biggest problem that cable networks have had is finding cable or satellite networks to carry these channels to customers. To understand why, skip ahead to the section titled “All HDTV Signals Are Not Equal.” Go ahead we’ll wait right here for a moment.

Basically (in case you didn’t skip ahead), cable and satellite systems have a limited amount of bandwidth (or slots for TV channels) within their broadcast systems. HDTV uses five to eight times as much bandwidth per channel as does analog TV or to reverse that, you can fit five to eight analog TV channels in the slot occupied by one HDTV channel. So it’s taken a bit of time for cable and satellite companies to begin to show interest in carrying HDTV channels they thought they could make more money off eight analog channels of fly-fishing and underwater basket-weaving than they could from one HDTV broadcast of The Final Four. The good news is that both groups of TV providers have begun to carry at least a handful of HDTV stations often more. To get into these HDTV cable signals, you need the following:

-  An HDTV service contract with your cable or satellite company. Unlike broadcast, this isn’t free you’ve got to pay the piper.

-  An HDTV satellite receiver or set-top box (for cable). In Article 9 we discuss digital-cable-ready TVs and CableCARDs, just now hitting the market, which will let you skip the set-top box. Specialized HDTV stations Existing broadcast and cable networks aren’t the only ones to realize the potential of HDTV. A small flurry of new networks specifically delivers HDTV channels to cable and satellite providers. A good example of this is HDNet (www.hd.net), the brainchild of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. HDNet was launched with the sole purpose of providing a range of original programming (news, sports, and series) along with licensed programming from other studios (like Andy Richter’s show!) all in full 1080i HDTV. Danny is particularly interested in HDNet’s show “Bikini Destinations” (Pat made that up!).

You can get HDNet’s two channels on both of the major satellite networks, as well as a growing number of cable provider’s networks. HDNet was the first, but not the last high-def-only network. For example, a cable-only network (owned by a consortium of cable companies) called INHD (www.inhd.com) provides two channels with a variety of original and licensed programming of sports, movies and other content (hey, that sounds familiar, huh?). Making Your Choice We have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, you probably have a choice of where you get your HDTV content. The bad news is well, you have to choose. This means, if you’re like us, hours of research and poring over Web sites, trying to figure out what works best to fit your HDTV needs. Well, there isn’t a magic bullet for you here in HDTV For Dummies.

Because HDTV availability is highly dependent upon exactly where you live (we mean right down to the street address it can differ even within neighborhoods), we can’t give anything but the most general advice. There’s nothing wrong with mixing and matching amongst these different sources. For example, if you want local HDTV content along with your satellite-TV source, you need to hook up an antenna to your dish and pick up the OTA broadcasts luckily, most HDTV satellite receivers have a built-in OTA HDTV tuner, so you don’t need extra equipment (beyond the antenna). So, given that wishy-washy disclaimer (sorry, but it’s true!), here’s Pat and Danny’s official advice:

1. Figure out what’s even available. In each of the following three articles, we give you some pointers to Web sites and other resources that will help you find out what you can get in your house.

2. Look at your budget. Keep in mind the fact that “free” OTA HDTV may not be free if you have an “HDTV-ready” system, and need to spend hundreds of dollars on an external HDTV tuner. Cable, on the other hand, might include a monthly fee, but doesn’t require any “up-front” expenses for tuners or set-top boxes. Many cable companies give you local HDTV channels free for the price of the set-topbox rental ($10/month or less, typically). Satellite may have lower monthly fees than cable, but also requires an up-front purchase of the receiver.

3. Examine closely the channel lineups available to you. Remember that quantity and quality are two different things. For example, the new HDTV satellite company Voom (www.voom.com, discussed in Article 10) offers 35 HDTV channels more than anyone else but you may not be interested in watching all of them. For example (and this is a totally made-up example, so please don’t sue us, Voom, because we love you!), do you really want to spend your HDTV viewing time watching some nature special on the mating habits of frogs? Look for the channels you love.

4. Consider the performance. In the following section “All HDTV Signals Are Not Equal,” we discuss some of the ways that various TV providers throttle back their HDTV signals to save bandwidth on their networks. In the end, you may find something that we haven’t mentioned, or something less than coldly rational and logical (Mr. Spock to the bridge!) that makes you decide on an HDTV provider. For example, for Pat (actually, for his wife, who is a huge baseball fan) it was a no-brainer he wanted satellite, but then his local cable company started broadcasting 100+ San Diego Padres games in HDTV each year. Case closed cable it is for Pat. All HDTV Signals Are Not Equal Not all HDTV signals are equal across all providers.

When the signal is sent from its source to you, it is usually compressed to cut costs and bandwidth requirements. How much the signal is compressed and what digital encoding scheme is used determines a lot about what you see on your HDTV. MPEG-2 is the standard used by digital-TV broadcasters today to compress, encode, and then ultimately decode the TV programs. This is necessary because there is not an unlimited amount of space available on the cable, satellite, and broadcast-TV networks for transmitting these signals. So suppose an over-the-air broadcast TV signal starts out its life at the central network hub as a 1920-by-1080i signal. This signal can first be encoded for broadcast at a rate of around 995 Mbps. By the time it is sent to you over the air, it’s compressed to a mere 18Mbps signal. That’s a lot of compression, but the picture still looks great. If the station chooses to compress that signal a little more, say down to 13 or 14 Mbps to make room for other channels in the same signal, then the compression is even greater. We can tell you that the difference between an 18Mbps and a 14Mbps signal is indeed noticeable, especially when the programming contains a lot of motion. And don’t forget, once the signal enters your HDTV set, it will probably encounter another round of downward resolution as it tries to put the original 1080i image on, say, a 720p TV set. Satellite providers also have similar compression challenges.

Transponder space (the satellite-located transmission systems) is so expensive that compression is required for everything. Popular channels are typically encoded at 15 Mbps or more before they go to the satellite operators. Depending on the available satellite bandwidth (could be 24 MHz or 36 MHz, which yields 27 Mbps and 40.44 Mbps of bandwidth respectively), satellite operators can compress these 15Mbps signals down to 13.5 Mbps, so they can cram two or three HDTV streams on these satellite signals, respectively. Cable operators have about the same options with the two major digital-cable modulation schemes in use today 64QAM, which offers a max bandwidth of 27.7 Mbps, and 256QAM, which has 38.8 Mbps available. They can compress the signals further, and cram more channels into each signal, or they can offer higher-quality signals as a way of competing better in the market. After all, the 38.8Mbps rate of the cable companies is twice the bandwidth per signal compared to the 19.4Mbps data rate of the broadcast TV folks so they can send two HDTV streams for each single HDTV stream that the over-the-air stations can send. Cable companies have to deal with the sheer number of places where the signals are converted from digital to analog and back. Signals start out as digital, but may be converted to analog composite by the distributor. The signal is converted to a digital composite (that is, component) signal by the recipient cable operator. Then, as it’s fed into the TV display unit, the signal is converted to one of several types of video signal: analog component, S-video, or composite. TVs that take in digital signals via digital interfaces can reduce some of this conversion as can improvements in signal distribution between the broadcasters and the operators. So, as complicated as this is, what’s it all mean for the average buyer? Here’s how we can net it out for you:

-  Not all HDTV signals are going to be the same. It depends on how the broadcasters compress the signals for the stations that you want to watch. Channels with a lot of action (like sports) tend to get more bandwidth; channels with a lot of static pixels like the Home Shopping Network or any cooking channel can survive more compression.

-  If you plan on watching a few channels a lot, do some research. Your ultimate goal would be to find out how much

bandwidth these channels are using. You can’t (easily) measure this yourself (and it’s about impossible without installing the service, if you’re using cable or satellite), but try to find a local bulletin board or newsgroup online to see what the local HDTV nerds have to say. For example, Pat spends a lot of time on http://hdtv.forsandiego.com/, reading about experiences with local HDTV options. You’ll find enthusiastic, smart folks who have the tools and the know-how to examine HDTV bit streams, measure them, and come out with concrete evaluations. Also, watch your neighbors’ TVs now and then, and compare what you can if it looks different, it probably is.

Who’s required to do what? Your over-the-air digital TV broadcaster only has 6 MHz (19.39 Mbps) of bandwidth over which it can send its TV signals. It can fill this in anyway it chooses, combining such broadcasts as HDTV, SDTV, weather images, and even FM broadcasts onto one bandwidth stream. The FCC, through its DTV rules, has said broadcasters must transmit one standard-definition digital-TV signal 480i and has not said anything about requiring HDTV. So TV stations have to make some economic decisions about how best to use that signal. In one chunk of 6MHz bandwidth, a broadcaster could send one full-quality, 720p 60-frame-per-second (fps) HDTV program; or, two shows, one (say) for a 720p or 1080i HDTV show and one 480i SDTV show, both at 30 fps; or, four 480i SDTV 30 fps shows. How a station mixes and matches its signals depends as much on its technology as its positioning in the market.

Something’s in the Air In most ways, HDTV is an amazing leap into the future. It’s digital! It’s high-definition! It’s shiny and new! It’s expensive! But HDTV does have one aspect that brings us all back to the olden days of black-and-white TVs the antenna has reappeared! And with the antenna comes all the fun of Dad standing on one foot and twisting the rabbit ears just so to bring in that hard-to-tune channel. Okay, so it’s not that bad (most of the time), but it can be challenging to tune into over-the-air (OTA) broadcast TV. We’re not going to kid you here cable-TV or satellite setups are much easier to use than an antenna. But OTA HDTV is free. FREE! And nearly every household in America is in range of at least one of these free HDTV stations (99 percent of homes, according to some sources). In this article, we discuss how you can figure out what OTA HDTV signals are available in your location (there are some great online tools!). Then we help you pick out the equipment you need (an antenna and a tuner), and finally we tell you how to get it all set up. Finding Local HD Broadcasts Before you do anything else, do your homework. In the case of OTA HDTV, this involves simply spending a little bit of time online looking for broadcast HDTV channels. Now you don’t have to do this research online, but if you have Internet access, that’s the best way to do so. If you don’t have Internet access, talk to the retailers from whom you’re buying your HDTV they probably have firsthand knowledge (or at least anecdotal information) about local HDTV signal availability. They may also have a kiosk that provides access to the same online information we’re going to talk about shortly.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) is the huge (and hugely influential) trade organization that includes just about every HDTV manufacturer in the world. So it has a vested interest in getting people to buy HDTVs. This interest is sometimes manifested as lobbying efforts with the FCC, or efforts to develop marketing and industry. It also pops its head up in the form direct-to-the-consumer education efforts. In the case of HDTV, the CEA had the brilliant idea (we’re not being facetious, it really was brilliant!) of providing an extremely easy-to-use HDTV “signal finder.” In conjunction, with a company called Decisionmark, the CEA has created this online system (called TitanTV) that lets you enter your address information, press a button, and come out the other side with a nice listing of all your HDTV-channel choices. Just go to www.titantv.com and follow the on-screen instructions. You can also access TitanTV at many HDTV retailers, and come home with a printout of your available stations. Not only does TitanTV find OTA stations for you, it also comes up with the cable and satellite stations available to you. You can do a quick comparison and see what best meets your needs. The CEA and Decisionmark have also teamed up to provide you with another way to view a listing of local HDTV broadcasters with their AntennaWeb.org system, which we discuss later in this article, in the section titled “Choosing the right antenna.” AntennaWeb.org is basically the same underlying database, optimized to help you choose an antenna TitanTV is designed to help you see what shows are being broadcast.

Tuning In HDTV breaks the old TV paradigm in many ways. One big difference is that not all HDTVs have a built-in TV tuner. Back in the olden days of NTSC and analog TV, this was quite rare a few high-end TVs were “monitors” and required an external tuner, but they were definitely in the minority. With HDTV and OTA HDTV broadcasts, the situation has been reversed at least for the time being (more on that soon). Many sets sold as HDTVs today are HDTV-ready, but don’t have any electronics inside them that can pick up an OTA HDTV broadcast (or any ATSC broadcast, whether high-definition or standard-definition and if you have no idea what we’re saying right now, check out Article 1 for a definition of ATSC and NTSC). The government is requiring TV manufacturers to include built-in tuners that can pick up OTA HDTV, starting with bigger (36+-inch) TVs in 2005. Soon this lack of tuners won’t be a problem. Building on a built-in tuner If you have an HDTV with a built-in ATSC tuner, you’re just about all set.

All you need to do is find the appropriate antenna (see the following section “Antennas A to Z”), make the connections, and go. It’s really that simple or at least it can be. Just follow the instructions in your HDTV’s manual for tuning in the HDTV stations we can’t help you there, since each HDTV on-screen setup process is different. Some HDTVs with built-in ATSC tuners also have special tuners that can decode QAM-encoded HDTV signals. QAM is the system used by most cable-TV networks. This means you may be able to pick up your local broadcast stations by just plugging in your cable TV connection. Note that this is different from the DCR (digital-cable-ready) systems we discuss in Article 9. And no, this has nothing to do with using an OTA antenna, but we thought it was a nice morsel of information to know in case you’re ever asked this question at a neighborhood BBQ. Adding on a tuner If you own an HDTV, chances are good that you won’t have that built-in ATSC tuner we mentioned in the previous section. Your HDTV probably has an NTSC tuner which can pick up analog broadcasts but it probably is only HDTV-ready, so you need to pick up an HDTV tuner box that you can connect between your antenna feed and your HDTV.