Who Wants to Wait for HDTV?

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

With its jumbo screen, crisp digital sound and a video picture as sharp as a 35-mm slide, high-definition television has been heralded as a couch potato's dream come true. But HDTV has run into some interference. Squabbling over technological standards and sniping between Japanese, European and U.S. manufacturers have slowed its development to a crawl. Industry experts now estimate that full-fledged HDTV may not arrive in U.S. homes until the turn of the century.

Yet video's evolution has been anything but stagnant in living rooms across the country. Consumers, their appetites whetted for high-quality TV images, have started to take progress into their own hands. To the delight of retailers and manufacturers, viewers are hooking together their video and stereo components, linking them with one or two new pieces of advanced controlling equipment and creating what has been dubbed home theaters. In a U.S. consumer-electronics market whose sales are increasing at a sluggish 4% a year (1989 total: $32 billion), sales of home-theater components are climbing at a pace of 25% or more. Among the hottest gear: big-screen stereo TV sets, laser-scanned videodisc players and audio/ video amplifiers that can drench the home audience in theater-like surround sound.

The boom in home-theater devices has heightened the electronics industry's sense of urgency about developing not only HDTV but also an array of interim products that will encourage consumers to keep upgrading their equipment. Last week two European electronics giants, Thomson and Philips, the largest makers of color TV sets for the U.S. market, said they plan to combine their long- term HDTV development efforts. In a more immediate step, the Europeans will join forces with NBC and the David Sarnoff Research Center to concentrate on what they call EDTV (extended-definition television), a wide-screen, digital- stereo version of today's standard. The manufacturers hope to have EDTV sets ready for delivery by 1993. Said J. Peter Bingham, vice president of technology for Philips Consumer Electronics: "We want U.S. consumers to have access to advanced TV services as quickly as possible."

Why the sudden consumer craze for improved TV? After all, Sony, Pioneer and others have been trying to market pricey "media rooms" and "home entertainment centers" for nearly a decade -- with notable lack of success. Electronics-industry experts point to several changes in viewing habits that are sparking sales of home-theater products. Thanks to the videocassette revolution, consumers have acquired a steady appetite for watching videotaped movies in the comfort of their dens and bedrooms. In little more than a decade, the percentage of U.S. homes with VCRs has zoomed from zero to 70. According to an industry survey, U.S. viewers rented 72 million movie tapes during just one week last October.

At the same time, many of these videophiles have bought compact-disc players, giving them an appreciation for the crispness of digital sound. For consumers who love their VCR and CD players, the logical next step is the laser videodisc player, which combines digital sound with high-resolution motion pictures. An estimated 300,000 U.S. households have laser videodisc players, for which manufacturers have produced more than 3,700 movie titles.

The nerve center of today's home theater is a little-known component called the audio/video receiver. With ports in the back for a variety of TV and stereo signals, the A/V receiver is the link that allows consumers to play their new stereo TV sets through the speakers and amplifiers of their hi-fi systems. Receivers equipped with Dolby Surround sound can re-create the full atmospherics of the movie theater, from the scream of jets passing overhead to the seat-shaking rumble of helicopter gunships. To ensure that what the actors say actually comes out of their mouths, models with the Dolby Pro Logic feature isolate dialogue and pipe it to a speaker mounted directly below the TV screen.

None of this comes cheap. A bare-bones home theater costs $400 for the A/V box, $700 for a stereo TV, $800 or more for a laser videodisc player and upwards of $1,500 for a five-speaker surround-sound system. And it is ruinously easy to spend $10,000 to $50,000 re-creating an RKO theater in a suburban ranch home. Yet the number of consumers who are trying to do just that has launched a booming market for audio/video installers: entrepreneurs who select and hook up the latest gear, often using wall-mounted speakers and sleek cabinetry to hide the equipment. A glossy new magazine, Audio/ Video Interiors, regularly dazzles its readers with images of posh pleasure domes of sound and light. Says John Briesch, president of Sony's Consumer Products Group (USA): "The only thing that has surprised us is how much people will pay." Even Sears and Montgomery Ward are planning to carry jumbo-screen TVs and surround sound systems, Briesch says.

Even so, prices will have to drop considerably before surround-sound TV becomes a mass-market phenomenon like the Walkman or the VCR. Unlike those breakthrough products, which instantly transformed electronic life, the new TV systems are likely to be perceived by consumers as a more gradual -- though inevitable -- improvement. Moreover, the Walkman did not require major home remodeling to work its magic. At the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, Mitsubishi demonstrated a 120-in. rear-projection TV set that calls for a 6 1/2-ft. space to be cleared out behind a wall before the set can be installed in a home. And not everyone wants his house turned into a videodome. "What happens when you build a house around a TV set," author Fran Lebowitz carped in the January issue of HG, "is that the house looks like a TV set."

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty/Las Vegas