Philips HDTV 1991

HDTV Yediot 1992

Columbia University

The TV is Dead – The TV is Alive - Tzadok Yechezkely - Yedioth Ahronoth “Seven Days” 1992

The TV is Dead – The TV is Alive

Tzadok Yechezkely

Yedioth Ahronoth “Seven Days”

New York, USA - 12/25/1992

Amihai Miron, a former Kibbutznik, is leading one of the five largest development teams of electronics and television manufacturing in the US competing to develop the future TV: huge screen, perfect technical quality, amazing sharp pictures, and all with real colors as if you are in the picture.  In few years, the technology he is developing will be the new broadcast system, making Billions of dollars and replacing our present television.

Attention all small screen lovers; give a last peek at your home television. After reading the following lines, you are invited to plan the farewell party for your home TV and please meet the next revolution of television, High Definition TV or in short HDTV. You are about to fall in love , or at least get addicted to it.

Let's imagine it is here, Thursday night, when the cameras are focusing on Maccabi Tel-Aviv playing one of its opponents in the Euro Cup. Forget the snacks. You won’t have time for them anyway. Most probably you will be busy with the remote. Not to switch channels, but to pick the right camera and shooting angle for the next minutes. Want to watch Gamtzi close? Want a reply of his last basket? No problem. Please press the right button, and you will get the angle you want and any replay you desire. An additional button will give you the statistical information of any player at any given point.

The highlight is the picture quality received at your home. It will give you the feeling that you are there, inside the game itself. It will not only be the larger screen size, but the quality: the depth, the natural colors and mostly the high resolution. You will be able to notice the leather-fibers on the ball and the sweat drops falling of the players.

Following the game, what about a good movie from the almost endless selection. Whatever you want at any time. With a push of a button you can watch movies critic. Did you choose? The excitement has just begun. On the large rectangular screen, similar to a movie screen, the selected movie will be displayed, in technical perfection. Boasting digital sound, clarity, and high resolution reducing the chance you will want to leave to the local movie theater to zero.

Press the right button, and you will get the angle you want and any replay you desire in the basketball game. Additional button will give you the statistical information of any player at any given point. Another one will give an almost endless list of movies, including the reviews next to it

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Amihai Miron glancing at me anticipating, while the technician is playing the first pictures on the strange television display in front of us. Strange, since after years of habit watching the square displays the strange rectangular display looks more like a reject from the production line. But this is how, says Miron, the TV of the future will look like.

The surprise replaces an almost uncontrolled sigh when the first images show on the screen. This is not a television, you immediately note. It simply can not be a television. The thin vein of the flower’s stems displayed on the screen are clearly seen.  The elephant fill the screen and the wrinkles of his skin are seen vividly. The small windows arcs on the state capitol building look clear. The colors of the sun set over the Jefferson memorial in DC looks so natural, that you feel like you are there. The sensation is that of a shortsighted person who suddenly found his glasses and sighs with relief. The world finally looks like it should, with all its details.

Amihai Miron, a Major in the artillery reserves, put a somewhat shy smile on his face, to our excitement. He expected it. This is the response of all, that enter this room, next to a laboratory loaded with circuit boards and computers – and is placed in front of one of the displays. Those strange rectangular things are threatening to conquer the world in the coming years, invade each of and take a bite of our bank account, whether we like it or not.

“ I have not seen many people who were unimpressed after experiencing this innovation” says the glasses wearing Israeli that looks completely out of place and time in this place. Truly who expected to find a Kibbutznik from Ruhama behind the most amazing electronic new product, since the first magic-box was introduced 53 years ago?

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At first look the long low rise building - located at the center of endless well maintained grass – looks like the culture hall of a very prosperous Kibbutz.  We are in the fortress of the electronic Dutch giant Philips, in upstate NY about an hour from NYC. The beautiful stream of the Hudson River is visible down the hill. Not far, along the winding road leading to the Labs, you can see only green worth and Christmas decorations on the doors and entrances to the beautiful homes along the road.

Inside, in the labs, a quiet, but difficult and expensive war is being conducted. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. In two months, or sooner, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will choose which HDTV system will be used in the US. Five different systems by five groups from large electronic companies are competing for the best HDTV system. One of them is the one being developed by the brain trust, led by Amihai Miron.

The significance of this win to the participants, is almost beyond description. The winner will have a great starting point selling HDTVs for the US market, with an upside of millions or even billions of dollars. If Philips (which partnered with four other companies like TV network NBC, and the French electronic giant Thomson) would win the race, it could become the largest HDTV manufacturer in the world.

Amihai Miron: “It is not sufficient to be smart here. You simply have to work harder than everyone”

Is it too much of a load for the skinny shoulders of one person? Miron doesn’t think so.  If he is under pressure or stressed out, it is not visible, a characteristic, he says, he developed during his military service.

Miron was born in Kibbutz Ruhama 39 years ago. His parents migrated to Israel in the 30s from Eastern Europe and probably dreamed that he would become the manager of the dairy farm or maybe the kibbutz manager. His early years in the kibbutz did not provide a reason to think differently. He was amongst the ‘big heads’, feeling responsible for everything. He is a natural leader, in the army too. “I liked to organize things”, he remembers now nostalgically. This characteristic will emerge and resurface here in America, and will explain a significant part of his success.

His decision to leave the Kibbutz for good, developed during his army service. After he finished officer school, first in his class, he volunteered to serve an additional half a year and after that he decided the Kibbutz was not for him. “The principle, that everyone gets an equal share with no correlation to the effort one puts, did not appeal to me”, he explained. My parents did not like my decision. “Like my disappointment in the Kibbutz, they were disappointed by my choice, but till this day I have full appreciation for what I received there”.

His appearance radiates a deceiving shyness. There is a lot of coarseness and resilience behind his pleasant and delicate appearance. He is amongst those who recognize their capabilities and demand recognition from their surroundings and the proper reward it brings. In the days to come, his American employers will also recognize and appreciate his directness and assertiveness.

What has characterized him all his life is his will to sweat more than anyone else, combined with endless determination and ambition. “ I simply do not like to fail”, he says. This is what drove him in the IDF to graduate 1st in his Officer School class, and the Technion (college) with high grades, despite endless days in the reserve and many side jobs from distributing newspapers to painting the dorms. “in the end I finished the Technion with a profit”, he chuckles.

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He arrived to the US almost accidentally. His wife Ayala, whom he met in the Technion, received an offer to work on project improving dams in Holland, and Amihai found a junior engineering job in Philips. After six months, at the end of the projects, they planned to fly back to Israel. Then someone from Philips in the US, who visited in Holland, noticed the young talent and suggested he come to visit. Why not, thought the Mirons and decided on a trip to America, before returning to Israel for good.

The Kibbutznik, who until then had not even seen a suit, bought one for the first time and arrived for a short interview that ended with a job offer. This was 11 years ago, and Amihai has no intent to apologize.  “I do not have any moral issue with it. It is a completely practical thing. You have to decide for yourself where you can live better.” This is probably not the philosophy of the average Kibbutznik, but Miron was never the average Kibbutznik.

Not an average engineer either. He was promoted six times – the last of them, to the rank of Sector Head (VP) Electronic Systems. A ‘battalion’ of hundred engineers, is reporting to him, responsible for developing, for the company, the latest in the television field.

“With the competition in this market, and specially in the difficult economic conditions”, says Miron, “If you are not in first or second place it is almost impossible to make money. Everyone here is smart. It is not enough to be smart. You simply have to work harder than everyone”. Peter Bingham, his boss, the President of Philips Labs in the US prefers to explain the meteoric rise of Miron in three words: “dedication, focus, and intelligence”.

At Philips they understood very quickly, that they have here a rare ‘animal’: combination of an endless ambition, workaholic, creative, open mind, and leadership ability. Not a disorganized scientist, or another in screw in the system. Not everyone is enthusiastic from his ambitions. There were few confrontations. But that was in the past. “Look, the bottom line is the accomplishments. You deliver results – and then they cannot argue with it”.

Very modest he is not, but at least he has good reasons for it. Before he landed on HDTV, Miron produced two winning developments that have made millions of dollars for Philips. The first is the development of Picture In Picture (PIP); it enables to watch two pictures simultaneously on the same screen. It became a bestseller. Philips (under the Magnavox brand) sold over a million televisions with it. A more significant innovation was the technology to eliminate the “shadow’ (ghost or double images) on TV. The magazine ‘Popular Science’ just selected this innovation as 'One of the best 100 new products of the year’.

Miron appearance radiates a deceiving shyness. There is a lot of coarseness and resilience behind his pleasant and delicate appearance. At Philips they understood very quickly, that they have here a rare ‘animal’: a combination of a workaholic, creative, open mind, with leadership ability and endless ambition.

     Amihai Miron in his lab loaded with printed circuit boards and computers. Japanese concept, American development

But nothing matches the significance and the magnitude of the HDTV project. It has to be said first that HDTV is not an invention of Miron or Philips. Already in 1968 the Japanese, specifically Takashi Fujii, developed the idea, but only 13 years later it was shown in the US. Till today it is not in commercial use in Japan, due to its complexity and cost.

The idea: to develop a new transmission system, capable of providing pictures at least twice the current quality.  In today’s television the picture is made of 500 horizontal lines. In HDTV, currently being developed, the number is about three times greater – 1440. A dramatic change.

In 1990 there was a real revolution: Innovation to compress the information and transmit the television picture digitally. By using digital transmission it is possible to deliver much more information on the same bandwidth – and to enjoy a clear picture without the noise, visible in regular TV. In addition, since it is possible to transmit a lot of data it transforms the television from a picturebox; to something closer to a combination of television and a personal computer.

Everything was on paper till the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) – motivated to great extent by the fear that the Japanese will dominate the field – decided to transition and make HDTV the only transmission technology by 2008. By then the US will use the new transmission standard. By this plan, most TVs  will be HDTV (the regular TV will be able to see the same programming, but who will want to keep this old and obsolete device?).

Here Miron enters the picture. In early 1991 Phillips, as it decided to join the race for the new system, was in a desperate situation. Some of the other competitors (like giants AT&T and Zenith) were already working on the project for over a year. Philips and its partners had to squeeze three years of research into one. ”To many it looked like mission impossible”, recalls Miron who received the responsibility for the core of this project.

He possessed, he acknowledges about himself, characteristics he obtained in Israel. He organized his 100 engineers like a military unit, including the discipline. Since that day, and till the agreed day to end the research, the work in the lab did not stop for one minute. The people found themselves working in shifts of 16 hours, escaping to catch few hours of sleep, and come right back. Miron is holding a board of electronic circuits and points with a smile to the thousands of hours it took to develop it. The project required the development of 100 boards like this one. “There are many nights in this board”, he says.

He is a leader more than anything else” says Viktor Goldstein, one of the engineers that participated in the marathon. “No one worked as hard as he did. He was always the last to go home. For us he was an example, not only a boss.’

During the year there were engineers who found themselves asleep on the wheel, one got diabetes, and others were simply exhausted to death. “I spent all my credit with my wife”, smiles Miron. The result was that on the due date, Philips and its partners, submitted the finished system to the FCC – HDTV camera and transmitted picture to HDTV television.

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Not all are enthusiastic about the new television. Many ask if the price is justified. Think about it for a moment: When the first televisions will be sold in the US in two years, the price of a TV 38 inches (any smaller can not display the full effect of the new picture) will reach a cost of at last $3,000. Only at the end of the century – when millions will get off the production lines - the prices will fall to $2,000 per TV. Better not to think about the prices in Israel. With the addition of taxes the price definitely will be very expensive.

Probably, like in the US , there will be someone in Israel that will buy HDTV to receive HD signal from Europe first (the Europeans will have HDTV in two to three years). Philips estimate that in two to three years when HDTV will come to the market at least a million people will run to buy the new device. Others will ‘get infected’ in the subsequent years. One can easily see the existing treasure. It is not a surprise that the large electronic companies fight tooth and nail to grab a piece of the pie.

In hundreds of TV stations offices across America people are equally enthusiastic about the project, but are concerned about the cost of transition to HDTV. ABC alone – the only network to make money last year- will have to invest $150 millions to change the equipment needed for production and transmission of HDTV in the coming years. The estimate is that the networks will be able to do it, but the small station may collapse.

“I do not see any way that we can go through it”, said lately Philip Lombardo, the owner of four small TV stations in Iowa, to the WSJ. But he will not have a choice: in 1999 stations will lose their license if they do not transmit HDTV.  Nine years later the TV we know today will die and disappear. Good to assume, that the Israeli television and cable TV will have to start thinking about the switch to the new system, sooner or later.

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This is not Miron’s problem. He has other problems. Among them to keep in touch with his three children (ages 2,5,8), Israel and the Hebrew language. “I am not apologizing that I am here, and I do not have a moral issue with it”, he repeats and says, “I am not pretending to deal with the world’s top issues. It is only television. But for me it is important”. The former Kibbutznik makes and will make millions of dollars for Philips, not his pocket. “I am an employee, so I do not see this money” he smiles, “yes, at times it is frustrating”.

Even if he had much more, it is not clear what he would do with it. In this way he has not changed much from his days in Kibbutz Ruhama. The suite still looks like it is not in place, and some of his subordinates live in larger homes than him. ‘It is really not my priority”, he says looking for the right words in Hebrew. Will he return? “I am open to the idea, if there will be an exciting offer”.

END