Germany zaps into digital television

[Gregg Lengling]

Berlin's hurry-up approach could set example for others
 
BERLIN When Sebastian Engel received a letter in the mail last winter warning that he would soon lose his over-the-air analog television service, he reacted like any 26-year-old graduate student with little money and less interest in the vagaries of TV technology.
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Engel, who lives in a bohemian part of the former East Berlin, ignored the promotional palaver about the brave new world of digital broadcasting, and instead asked his landlord whether he could sign up for cable.
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Alas, he was told, his apartment block, with its drab, coal-heated buildings, was not wired for cable. So after procrastinating for several weeks, Engel finally paid E150, or $174, for a set-top box that enabled his aging, portable TV to receive a digital signal.
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Now, he gets 25 channels and a crystal-clear picture, compared with the six channels and snowy reception he had before the switchover.
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"Sometimes the picture goes off for a couple of seconds, but otherwise it's pretty great," said Engel, as he channel-surfed through a soccer match, a hip-hop music video and the BBC news.
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On Aug. 3, Berlin became the world's first major city to switch entirely to digital television broadcasting from analog. The transition went almost unnoticed, in Germany or elsewhere. Contrast that with the United States, where the same process has been bogged down by politics, special interests and a stubborn fear that scrapping analog television will ignite a revolt among viewers.
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The German example could prove instructive to countries like the United States, where digital broadcasting - and the array of multimedia services likely to spring from it - still seems like a distant dream.
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Six years ago, the U.S. Congress set the end of 2006 as the date by which most TV broadcasts would be digital, but U.S. industry executives say that the switch may not be completed before 2020.
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In Germany, public officials have taken a tougher line.
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"We knew it would work only if we set a hard deadline," said Sascha Bakarinov, the head of the Broadcasting Authority of Berlin and Brandenburg, which oversaw the switchover. "You can take six months or two years or a decade, and people are still only going to react in the last few weeks."
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Berlin's hurry-up approach was risky. Bakarinov worried about a consumer outcry over the cost of the set-top boxes, not to mention tales of fixed-income retirees deprived of their television.
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But thanks to an elaborate public relations campaign and government subsidies for people who could not afford the boxes, Berlin kept the complaints to an occasional squawk.
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In a city accustomed to lavish public services since German reunification - Berliners reared up at even the suggestion of closing one of three government-supported opera houses - the smooth transition is no small achievement.
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"The German approach is extremely radical," said Ulrich Reimers, a professor at the Technical University in Braunschweig and a chief designer of the digital television standard in Germany. "This is really the one and only place in the world where this has happened."
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The switch to digital is under way in other German cities, including Cologne, Hannover and Düsseldorf.
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By next May, Reimers said, digital signals will reach 23 million of Germany's 82 million people. By 2010, he predicted, "Germany will be analog-free."
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That is a bit of an exaggeration because out of 34 million TV households in Germany, 19 million have cable and 12 million use satellite receivers, both of which are analog. The switchover to digital affects only the 3 million households who receive their TV over the air, via rooftop aerials or rabbit-ear antennas.
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In the United States the comparable over-the-air figure is 10 million of 106 million households.
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Many of those 10 million are in remote areas - one reason why U.S. politicians are loath to cut off even a single household.
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In the United States, digital television has been caught in a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma.
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Most consumers have little incentive to buy digital TV sets or converter boxes because there is little to watch, and broadcasters see little reason to invest in it because there are hardly any viewers.
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Nobody expects the congressional deadline of Dec. 31, 2006, for digital conversion to be met, because Congress said it would exempt any local market in which fewer than 85 percent of the households were equipped with a digital TV or converter.
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That threshold seems unlikely to be reached in most markets until closer to 2020, some broadcast executives say.
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As long as millions of U.S. households are still receiving their television over the air, many of them in remote areas, politicians are understandably loath to cut off even a single one.
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Another problem, people say, is that the digital debate in the United States has tended to focus on high-definition television.
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The technology, known by the acronym HDTV, delivers crisp pictures, to a rectangular screen shaped like a movie screen, compared with the nearly square picture of conventional television. But it demands lots of broadcast spectrum, as well as special TV sets.
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By contrast, the subject of high-definition television rarely comes up in Germany.
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Reimers insists that broadcasters here will be able to deliver HDTV if there is a market for it. But he is more excited by other services, like mobile digital television, which purports to offer crystal-clear TV reception, even in fast-moving cars, trains and buses.
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Even as Berlin promoted digital television to apartment dwellers like Engel, it used the tagline, "Das Uberall Fernsehen," in its general advertising campaign. That translates as "Everywhere television."
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"This is going to be a highflier," Reimers said of mobile television. "This is what you'll be reading about in a few years."