Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television.

THE BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE OF TELEVISION

How cunning, conceit, and creative genius collided in the race to invent digital, high-definition TV

In Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television (Harcourt Brace, 402 pp.), Joel Brinkley documents what can only be described as

a contemporary industrial epic - a multi-front war for ownership of the world's television viewers. The race for digital high definition television (HDTV) started simply and, as is so often the case, quickly became bloodsport. HDTV's journey into living rooms began with an eye-expanding demonstration by Japan's public broadcaster and evolved into a confused and confusing struggle with new technology, corporate culture and old-fashioned American politicking. As the battle lines changed and changed again, the technology continued to soar. Few emerged unsullied, and fewer emerged, period. (Do you know anyone with a high definition television set?)

When Japan's NHK first unveiled its analog Muse system in 1988, TV-watchers of the world awoke to the idea of a veritable movie screen inside their homes. High definition images were composed of more than 1,000 lines, almost double the detail found on standard 525-line sets. Looking at one of these new sets was like putting on that first pair of spectacles: a functional yet fuzzy world suddenly acquired miraculous clarity. Onscreen waves, leaves and automatic pistols glowed with shocking texture. Also wowing was the widescreen format, designed to accommodate the eye's natural field of vision. From that moment on, ordinary television sets could not help but seem as anachronistic as those clunky black-and-white boxes of the 1950s.

The first high definition images, however, turned out to be crystalline flickers at the end of a deep and dark tunnel. The appearance of Japan's techno-toy quickly triggered a spell of Yellow Peril in the United States, where for every alarm bell there are two opportunists scrambling to get down the pole. In the book's lovely central irony, HDTV got its initial boost in the U.S. from its eventual nemesis, the National Association of Broadcasters. Faced with the possibility of losing its extra channels to users of two-way radios (police departments, ambulances, etc.), the NAB told the government it needed its chunk of the spectrum to accommodate the impending high definition effort. The NAB retained the channels and then, as planned, disowned the monster when the technology arrived. HDTV, broadcasters now claimed, was unnecessary and (worse) unaffordable, of no interest to the public. By then, though, the damage had been done. Private companies had spent more than eight years and $500 million on the high definition trail, and America had, dazzlingly, bested the Japanese at their own system.

The bulk of Defining Vision documents the period between the NAB's first HDTV-related proposal and the FCC's adoption of an American-built digitial high definition standard nearly 10 years later. Brinkley's primary focus is the unprecedented free-market "bake-off" orchestrated by the FCC. Stung by the Bush administration's failure to support developing HDTV systems, FCC Advisory Committee Chair Richard Wiley dangled a carrot before the noses of private companies: create the best high definition system, set the standard and count your billions. The lure proved irresistible, and competing corporations lined up to join in the pursuit. The pretenders soon fell away, and a motley cast of competitors remained. Government tests ensued, as did malfunctions, "implementation errors," power plays and spasms of genius. As one competitor complained, "It's goddamned difficult to schedule an invention."

Brinkley, trying to cut a swath through this thicket of electrical and corporate overgrowth, assigns each of his competing players broad features and transparent motives. Sarnoff (formerly RCA) is august and condescending, puffy with its own legacy. Fading Zenith grasps at a final digital straw by partnering with AT&T's lab rats. General Instrument is San Diego's scrappy cable gang, fresh and brilliant. MIT, led by the America-first mentality of its leader, surveys all from an impervious ivory tower. And then there is Japan's NHK, the front runner with the doomed look in its eye.

These companies jostle and squabble, junking some ideas and honing others, all the while pushing high definition into a genuinely extraordinary realm: digital. For years, the only words on the subject were, "We'll have digital TV the same day we have an antigravity machine." And yet it happened, even before the companies had slouched into an uneasy Grand Alliance. (In another of the story's ironies, America's invention of digital was actually stoked by the breakthrough of Woo Paik, a Korean whiz at General Instruments.) The television-watching experience had been more than improved; it had been reinvented.

The author's mission is to lay it all down, as quickly, lucidly and painlessly as possible. A few personal touches dot the landscape, but no true heroes appear, no central character or company controls our interest or haunts the narrative. The key participants seem at once nervy and weak, narcissistic and occasionally visionary. Brinkley's presentation of the technology often matches his clean depiction of the politics. He explains channel width with this deft parallel: "A channel only 6 megahertz wide is roughly analogous to a water pipe that is only 6 inches in diameter." Digital compression, the process by which a system makes "logical estimations" of a picture's change from frame to frame, is defined thus: "A computer might look over a few consecutive frames of a car chase and guess that in the next one the car was likely to move a little to the right. So it would send a single message - 'move existing car to the right' - instead of a far more complex message recreating the car from scratch."

This is good stuff. And yet Brinkley is in some ways handicapped by his own mission. The polish, the smooth intercutting of sequences and characters, limits the book's ability to expand in our minds. Too much is happening for him to take us deep enough inside the desperation or the genius. How exactly did Woo Paik defy gravity? We know what he did, but we're less sure how - what leaps of trial, error and invention went on in that lab room? What does it really mean when one player says, "There are no American companies in this business"?

Without greatness or darkness, we're left with a gang of grabby corporations hustling to churn out some new TVs. Defining Vision ought to become a standard primer on digital television, and it will only gain in relevance as the issues become more tangled. (And, with computers and interactivity getting in on the act, entanglements are guaranteed.) But one can't shake the feeling that Brinkley is reaching for a work of art, for a profound evaluation of American dreams and dreamers at the end of the millennium. He never gets that far; to do so, he would have had to double the book's length (and halve his readership). He will have to settle for his impeccably clean picture - precise and detailed, but lacking the mysterious power of an unsteady signal.