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.