17 pct. in USA Own High Definition TV
David Pogue writes in The New York Times Which New DVD Format? Neither Just Yet.
[tease]
Forrester Research says that 17 percent of American households have high-def TV screens;
One interesting question is when — if ever — high definition TV will reach a flashover point where only the poorest of the poor watch standard definition TV. If you think to the color vs. black and white TV transition, one day you woke up and the whole world (except you) owned a color TV.
I remember because I was something of a color TV laggard myself.
But I’m not sure that day comes for high definition TV. Much of what we watch will not benefit from the extra resolution. Do you care if you see 24 in standard vs. high definition? Will our viewing experience improve all that much? I doubt it.
High def is useful for sports programming, or watching ultra close-ups of butterflies on the Discovery channel.
Delivering high def is a technical challenge. The much higher bandwidth for HD video translates into higher operating costs, whether it’s delivered by satellite, cable, or your friendly telco TV service provider.
Another reason to be skeptical is the huge wave of lower resolution, lower quality video programming that’s starting to roll on shore. Video delivered over the internet is far from high def, but it can be compelling.
Video is coming to your mobile phone, highly compressed, but watchable. TV signals will soon (in the USA) be beamed to your mobile phone, as they are today in Korea.
High definition TV is a significant part of our video future. But it’s far from becoming the one true path for video entertainment.
June 22nd, 2006 at 1:40 pm
I am convinced to Europeans think more clearly than Americans because they look at a TV image with more scan lines. This sounds like a joke, but I realy think this is so.