La Tour de France in HDTV and RFID
Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Mon, Jul 27, 2009
Like most company owners I work most every Saturday and my routine is to ride my bike home afterwards. Yesterday I was riding home and got caught in a line of thunderstorms featuring 40 mile an hour winds and blinding rain. The visuals triggered a memory of a Tour stage last week. The rain ricocheting off the shiny black pavement and exploding like tiny water balloons, was exactly what I saw on the roads of a little village in France last week.
That single detailed image brought back my memory of the Tour. Plenty of other scenes broadcast this year have been nothing less than spectacular. Paul Sherwin and Phil Liggit describing the history behind some of the magnificent chateaus, educating viewers on the geography surrounding the rolling rivers, or showing the newest features of the $10,000 racing bikes were all were brought vividly to life by that Versus who finally broadcast the Tour in high definition television (HDTV).
The scenic beauty of France, Spain and Switzerland was heightened by the bright colorful jerseys, futuristic carbon fiber racing machines accented with mirror-finished chrome and dramatic lighting. Without a doubt the Tour is the quintessential application - no - the perfect use case for HDTV. So why did it take 13 years to get there?
The first commercial broadcast of HDTV was in North Carolina in 1996 (early trials of 199 sites took place in 1994 but '96 was the first real market use. Thirteen years before that first broadcast in 1983 the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-R) set up a working group to create an international standard for HDTV. Does all this seem familiar? If it doesn't it should, it's a typical adoption cycle for new technology.
"RFID is dead", "HDTV will never catch on; the TVs are too expensive", "RFID tags need to get cheaper", "analog TV will never go away", "Bar codes will never go away"
With any global technology adoption you could substitute the words and get the same result. Exchange RFID for HDTV, switch TVs for Tags, etc. In the last six months ODIN has had more inbound phone calls and web inquiries than in the previous two years combined. We're working on one project that would be more than 100,000 RFID readers, just in the USA. There are millions of shipping containers that could use the SMART container. You get my point.
As I watch Alberto Contador and Lance Armstrong sip champagne riding toward the Champs-Élysées (I can see the sun glinting off every tiny bubble as it rises to the top of their glass) I realize that RFID, like HDTV, will find the perfect applications it's only a matter of time. It also makes me think RFID is ahead of schedule for typical new technology adoption cycles. Now that the experimentation of RFID 1.0 has matured to a stable and consistent RFID 2.0 the early adopters will reap significant benefits.