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Ostroff resolves DTV battle, gears up for high-def push
Three months ago, Sinclair Broadcasting's Nat Ostroff did an about-face. He ended a five-year battle that pitted his scrappy Baltimore-based station group against the entrenched powers of the TV business.
After relentlessly pushing the FCC, Congress, the National Association of Broadcasters and the Consumer Electronics Association to dump the U.S. DTV-transmission standard, Sinclair's technology chief switched gears. The move caught the rest of the industry off-guard. Although critics accused him of slowing DTV acceptance, Ostroff makes no apologies.
He credits his turnaround to Zenith. After five generations of refinements, Zenith DTV receiver chips have overcome their most glaring deficiency: the inability to hold signals without rooftop antennas.
"We have been misunderstood from the beginning," he insists. "Our fight wasn't to delay DTV but to expose its weaknesses and have them addressed."
Still, Ostroff ignited a firestorm when he issued his first warnings in 2000.
The problem, he said, was the U.S. method for controlling amplitude of TV-signal waves. That...