June 24th Seattle SIGGRAPH Meeting Review -- Ken Greenebaum

Tuesday we were very fortunate to have Alvy Ray Smith talk to us about his involvement in the Digital TV wars on the DTV Team (comprised of COMPAQ, Microsoft, intel, and Lucent). A very large group of folk turned out for this meeting, 92 people, and were comprised of many new faces including video chip manufacturers and Television reporters.

The battle for the future of digital TV according to Alvy is between The Grand Aliance ATC ("the forces of analog bits") and the DTV team who feel "digital bits are more powerfull". Basicaly the digital folk feel that bits are bits and that it is folly to spec the video format, much better to make video formats self describing and flexible.

Alvy has a wonderful web page, Digital Bits Are Better than Analog Bits, which I encourage anyone interested to visit (instead of my trying to sumarize the talk from my notes). Please contact me if you have any questions or comments on this review.