David Niles, a self-declared expert on emerging television and video technologies who worked with the Federal Communications Commission on establishing standards for HDTV, thinks the power struggle is overblown, calling the DTV versus ATSC specifications topic a non-issue. He sees the central markets issue as relating to the programming software which will be used to deliver HDTV content rather than display hardware. Both DTV and ATSC will be vastly superior to current display technology and the whole debate is anyway predicated on the notion that computers will inevitably merge with television in one teleputer appliance. And that’s not a given, according to Niles, who believes the market will quickly decide how it wants to view HDTV and the hardware will simply catch up.
