Reverse Engineering Times Square

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Reverse Engineering Times Square The Visitor
Channel David Mycue with Tom Piper Academic
Media Production Services Massachusetts Institute
of Technology Wednesday, May 21, 2003
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• Background
• Times Square large-panel video reaches mass
  audience
• Reverse engineer to reach an even larger
  audience
• Create Visitor Channel test platform
• Link Boston hotel, cultural, retail and
  entertainment venues.

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• NTSC video as a common denominator
• NTSC was always a compromise
• (29.97 fps, interlacing)
• Flawed model to distribute video and text
• Video signal not designed to carry data
• NTSC standard reduces clarity of moving text
  content and/or images
• Fails to capitalize on available efficiencies
• (text, images)
• TV channels, News channels (Bloomberg, MSNBC,
  etc.) cannot easily adapt to data transmission

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NTSC as data channel
Video on PC-devices is easy Data into video is
inefficient TV real estate is segmented into
multiple data regions Video reduced to 400x300
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NTSC Text encroachment
Video is now reduced to a 400x200 area.
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NTSC as strict data channel
Screen graphics over NTSC squanders
bandwidth Underutilizes major resource
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• Visitor Channel
• Reference project opportunity
• Incorporate broadcast TV into multi-resolution
  (1920x1280 to 160x120) digital display
• Accessible by multiple devices
  (PDA, cell phone, etc.)
• Links to hotels
• Received at WiFi hotspots

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• Visitor Channel streaming
• Handles high quality video
• Streaming Big 3 handle MPEG2
• DVD players on PCs play MPEG2 video
• MPEG2 is ubiquitous transmission format
• Forward compatible - MPEG2 streams can be HDTV

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• Visitor Channel streaming
• Handles data much more flexibly and efficiently
• Define multiple independent real estate areas
• Handles text as text streams (RealText)
• Handles images as image files (RealPix)
• MPEG4 will add more features (primitives)

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Simple Case Selectable Video Streams
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• Visitor Channel capabilities
• Channel advertising
• Interactivity (control of each content area )
• Specialized delivery over all devices
• Distributed control of information
• Color coded information for specific groups
• Override by higher level content