The “Grand Alliance” of “fierce competitors” that worked together...

The “Grand Alliance” of “fierce competitors” that worked together to develop what became the North American DTV standard was “a great adventure in cooperation and collaboration,” said Zenith Vice President Wayne Luplow, according to the written text of a keynote he gave Tuesday at the IEEE’s International Conference on Consumer Electronics in Berlin. “When you work in an arena where there’s no definitive decision-making process, you conclude that cooperation is the only way you're going to get there,” Luplow said. “It’s a continual give-and-take -- like a marriage -- otherwise, you don’t get anywhere!” When the FCC ratified the Grand Alliance system on Christmas Eve 1996, it was “a profound decision that still ripples throughout our industry,” he said. “On reflection about the Grand Alliance experience, I think there are important lessons to be learned. Listen to what your in-house and out-of-house colleagues are doing. Look for win-win solutions. You can compete forever and end up with nothing that consumers and industry will embrace. It doesn’t have to be a battle to the death, as it was with the Beta and VHS recording wars in which, arguably, the better technology, with the better picture quality, lost. But the consumer-accepted system won out -- the system that could record two hours on one tape.” The next-gen ATSC 3.0 system “will bring new flexibility and new opportunities for over-the-air TV stations,” Luplow said. “Mobility will continue to grow in importance,” and Internet connectivity “is already a standard feature in most big-screen TV sets, merging the immediacy of live TV with the deep catalog of streamed content and the information-rich Internet,” he said. “But I also believe that we must have patience. This stuff takes time. After all, many of our technology transitions have ended up in the dust-bin of history. Transitional waters are sometimes littered with technologies that get thrown overboard. Remember: 8 Track tape? AM Stereo radio? The cassette and the laserdisc?"