MPEG-2 Is Alive and Well And Living in China

You might not have noticed that it wasn't just Mark Twain who got a premature obit. At least once in your life you probably saw the picture of a beaming Harry S. holding the newspaper headlined "Dewey Defeats Truman."

Good old analog NTSC is supposed to die one second after 11:59:59 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2006 (and, if the FCC had its way, it would be a year earlier than that). Will it?

Hey, go ahead and assume that a dictatorial anti-NTSC regime takes over the United States between now and then and bans analog TV broadcasting. Well, there'd still be something like 300 million NTSC TV sets in the country, perfectly able to be used with cable and satellite. Ban analog cable and satellite outputs, and there'd still be a couple-hundred million VCRs and DVD players with (quasi-) NTSC outputs. It ain't easy to kill a technology, which is why I'm so amused by the reports that MPEG-2 is dead.

Allow me to be among the first million or so to acknowledge that there are more efficient squeezers than MPEG-2. So what? We live in the age of thousand-line HDTV. About a femtosecond after the first NTSC proposed 525-line TV in 1940, there were folks yelling to change it to a thousand lines. Now it's 64 years later, and there's still one whole heck-and-a-half of a lot more 525-line TVs out there than thousand-line TVs- and it's going to stay that way for a good long time.

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