Re: [Patents] new MS patents on basis for digital tv standards

[James Heald <j.heald@ucl.ac.uk>]

James Heald wrote:


> It's one of the nice tricks you can do with the COFDM standard for 
> all-the-world-except-the-USA digital TV broadcast, for example.  COFDM 
> uses spread-spectrum techniques to break the RF bandwith into several 
> thousand different orthogonal virtual digital channels; the 
> orthogonalisation is explicitly designed to separate the channels into 
> ones which are more vulnerable  to particular sorts of interference and 
> ones which are less vulnerable; or which are invariant or non-invariant 
> to relative motion.  By using the hardiest channals for the 
> bread-and-butter information, and putting into the most vulnerable 
> channels only the finest-level refinement information, the CODFM people 
> were able to demonstrate full HDTV reception on a fixed installation, 
> with simultanous good-quality standard definition reception using Nokia 
> portable tablets on a moving bus.
>
> With a filing date of 24 March 2000, MS should have a big 
> obviousness/prior art problem with Claim 1 of #6,510,177.

Reports on the COFDM multiresolution live demonstration at NAB, 10 April 
2000
http://www.media-visions.com/itv-eurogame.html
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000411S0051

The DVB consortium surely were openly discussing the potential of doing 
this, and how to design it into their system, for years before the 
working demo.