HDTV, when will it hit it big?

[Wilco]

I wish all these damn networks would just broadcast their signals in hdtv now, and make everyone upgrade!!!!:p :p :p

Imaging getting DirectTV with 220 channels of HD!!!

WOW!

[AUMMitsu]

I believe this still holds true
The Federal Communications Commission (F.C.C.) has mandated that all stations be capable of broadcasting HDTV by 2006.

[ZeroDegreeK]

Most networks (like Fox) are fighting the 2006 deadline. They say it is too costly to update their networks. They also say that very few consumers are set up to receive HDTV so why put out the programming. Its a catch 22, people don't buy HDTVs because there is no programming, networks don't offer HDTV because there aren't many people watching.

All the networks were issued extra bandwith. Instead of broadcasting HDTV which takes a huge chunk of this bandwith, Fox and others, would prefer to multicast. That means you will have 5 Fox channels all pumping out infomercials instead of HDTV. It is all about the money.

It really upsets me that very few people are upgrading to HDTVs in their house. The TVs they are using now use the same broadcasting technology as my grandfather's 50 years ago. When Microsoft pumps out another software upgrade, the whole world stands in line to get it, but upgrade your TV? Why bother, it works fine.

More people need to see HDTV.

[BigRed]

I believe that consumers are confused by the whole HDTV scene. There is not enough general information out there. When someone walks into Best Buy or Circuit City and ask about HD the salesman has no idea what they are talking about. If you ask 5 different sales people you get five different answers. I think it is too intimidating when a sales person says

"You need this and this to get this, or this and this and you get these channels, but if you can't get any with out this box, and you need to go back to an antenna on the roof, and the cable system you are currently using is useless as far as HD so you need to change that."

I know my own experience of getting HDTV lasted over two months because I could get straight answers from anyone. It is hard to get someone to spend at least 3K when they really are not sure what they are getting. They figure, forget it, I will just buy it when it gets easier.

It's also hard for people to comprehend what you are talking about with multicasting and channel 12.1 or 8.1 and 8.2 and just because it is a High Def channel doesn't mean they are broadcasting in HD. I have had people over and they get floored by the HD shows and they want it, but when I start explaining what the have to do they get a look on their face like forget it it's not worth it.

I think that if more sales people had the facts about HD it would be easier for people to buy into.

[AUMMitsu]

yea, I think HDTV is a little to confusing still, its not like you can just buy it, install it and everythings working perfectly. But i think it will start to catch on because i see many of the big TV stores in my area starting to phase out the non HDTV sets (or already have)

[ZeroDegreeK]

I understand the confusion.

I know people who think they have HDTV because it said "High Definition Made Possible by ........" at the bottom of some programs.

Also, I hear a lot of "I have digital cable, isn't that the same as HDTV."

You will know it is HDTV when you see it.

[TOM3]

I met a man a couple days ago who was excited about just buying a new HD TV from Best Buy. I told him that was great. He told me he was going to get it delivered this Thursday, and he was going to catch the rest of the Olympics in HD. I asked him what his HD source was, and he said the cable. I had really bad news for him. No HD cable in our area.
His 17 year old sales person at the store didn't talk with him at all about this. I brought him up to speed, and gave him the name of an outfit that will get him set up. It's a small wonder that there is so much confusion about what it takes to have HDTV in your home, with jerks like this in the market place. Well, maybe the kid isn't a jerk, but Best Buy certainly is with sales people on the floor without a clue. PK is needed right now!

[TOM3]

I met a man a couple days ago who was excited about just buying a new HD TV from Best Buy. I told him that was great. He told me he was going to get it delivered this Thursday, and he was going to catch the rest of the Olympics in HD. I asked him what his HD source was, and he said the cable. I had really bad news for him. No HD cable in our area.
His 17 year old sales person at the store didn't talk with him at all about this. I brought him up to speed, and gave him the name of an outfit that will get him set up. It's a small wonder that there is so much confusion about what it takes to have HDTV in your home, with jerks like this in the market place. Well, maybe the kid isn't a jerk, but Best Buy certainly is with sales people on the floor without a clue. PK is needed right now!

[sieve11]

This is probably noted elsewhere in this forum, but it must be said again. The government has NOT issued any mandate for HDTV, ever.
The 2006 deadline only refers to DTV, or Digital Television. HDTV is a subset of DTV, but the FCC, nor any other government agency, has any requirements for High Definition broadcasting.

As far as the general state of HDTV information distribution, it is pretty weak. Forums like this have very helpful information, but they are not normally found by the people who need them the most.

The salespeople at retail outlets have been mostly uninformed and untrained regarding their HD equipment. I have met a few salepeople who have some knowledge, one at a Circuit City and one at a Best Buy. The other 300 have no clue.

The worst line I ever heard was at an ABC WH. An older couple was very interest in buying, but they wanted to know exactly how did the station get the picture so clean. The salesman, without even blinking an eye, said to them, "Well, back at the station, they turn up the voltage and that gives them more power to make the better picture."

I almost swallowed my tongue.

[Dan]

Actually, I don't think its true that the government never required the networks to go with HDTV. I think they did for a while and it was only a few years ago that they reduced the requirement to simply DTV not HDTV. Fortunately, by then networks like CBS, ABC, and NBC had already chosen a true HDTV format for their DTV broadcasts. Given that they have already invested a lot in HDTV they aren't going to revert to some 480p standard.

At this point HDTV has a momentum of its own and their is no turning back. Eventually, even Luddites like FOX will have to go to true HDTV because viewers will start abandoning them in favor of networks that do broadcast it. As someone who has been following HDTV since the format battles of the early 90's it is clear that HDTV is starting to catch on. Think of it, two years ago how many consumer electronics stores even carried HDTVs? How many ads did you see for them? Yes it may be true that the sales clerks are clueless but at least the stores have lots of HDTV's and actually display true HDTV signals on them.

Also, a couple years ago it was rare when there was anything being broadcast on HDTV. Now, CBS, ABC, and HBO broadcast a decent amount of HDTV programs and we even have an all HDTV network (HDNet). Again, that is a big improvement over what existed in the recent past.

So no one should despair about HDTV. It is definitely the wave of the future. I think its adoption was slowed down a little bit by all the hype around PCs and the Internet. But trust me, two or three years from now the major consumer electronic thing that people will be buying won't be PC's, or Palm Pilots or X-Boxes - it will be HDTV sets. A lot of people don't understand that yet - they still think that computers are the big thing, or "interactive tv" or other such junk. Trust me, people spend a lot more time watching TV than playing with any of those gadgets so when a vastly improved TV is available it is going to fly off the store shelves - even at high prices.

So my final prediction is that HDTV is really going to take off (by which I mean being in at least 20% of households and increasing rapidly) in the next 3 to 4 years.

[rewilliams2]

All,

I think HDTV will really take off in a big way when there is a recording device (HD-DVD?) on the market. Right now the copy protection battle between DVI and Firewire is holding that up. Nothing like a spec standards war between the MPAA, broadcasters, and manufacturers to screw everything up for a few years.

While one might enjoy lots of programming on an HDTV set (hopefully soon), everyone would like to either timeshift or permantly record thier shows.

just my 2 cents,
rewiliams2

[ZeroDegreeK]

Originally posted by rewilliams2
All,

I think HDTV will really take off in a big way when there is a recording device (HD-DVD?) on the market. Right now the copy protection battle between DVI and Firewire is holding that up. Nothing like a spec standards war between the MPAA, broadcasters, and manufacturers to screw everything up for a few years.

While one might enjoy lots of programming on an HDTV set (hopefully soon), everyone would like to either timeshift or permantly record thier shows.

just my 2 cents,
rewiliams2

You can thank JVC for the copy protection battle. I may be wrong, but I think they are the only ones behind DVI/HDPC. Most other manufacturers including Sony and Mitsubishi are behind IEEE 1394 / HAVi / 5C. Mitsubishi has come out and said their "promise module" for older sets will only support Firewire/5C.

[rewilliams2]

ZeroDeGreek,

Check out this site for more info on DVI vs. Firewire copy protection (scroll down about two pages):

http://www.dtvmax.com/main.htm

rewilliams2

[Dan]

Talk about HDTV catching on - I just found out that Time Warner cable in New York ran out of HDTV decoder boxes due to high demand and now I have to wait until July or August to get one.

I guess its taking off a little to fast for me.

[ZeroDegreeK]

Dan,

You should have asked them how many they had before they ran out. Then you could tell if it was taking off. :D

Make sure you call them a couple of times a week. People return equipment all the time, maybe you could get lucky. You can do like I did and annoy them until they hook you up just so you stop calling and asking.

[Dan]

They said that they have installed a few hundred. So there are a few hundred cable HDTV people in Manhattan plus whatever number of people have Direct TV or just use a regular antenna. So you are talking about maybe a couple of thousand in Manhattan which has a population of 1.5 million.

So the numbers are still very small but the direction is clear

[ZeroDegreeK]

In Houston they told me they installed several thousand. We have a ton of HD channels though. HBO-E, HBO-W, SHO-E, SHO-W, CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX(480P), PBS, and UPN is comming soon. The good thing is most of the prime time shows I watch are in HD. It's probably because they are in HD. Except for NBC who only have Leno and the Olympics.

[Dan]

Well, we are getting a little closer to getting the periphrials that take advantage of HDTV. The Wall Street Journal reported today that 9 major electronics corporations including Sony, Phillips, Sharp, Hitachi, Samsung, Thomson and others have agreed on a format for HDTV R/W DVDs. The DVDs will hold 27 gigabytes of video which is 6 times the current standard. That is enough for 13 hours of standard format TV or 2 hours of HDTV. It is not clear if it will be backward compatible with existing DVDs.

The article didn't say anything about copy protection features and it is not known when these new DVDs will go into production (hopefully soon !).

Dan

[vansmack]

This is so true. I have been considering getting an HDTV for over a year but all the confusion has put me off a few times. My main concern is I want a TV that supports 1080P. Why spend thousands on a tv that does not support it since this is no doubt what everyone will eventually have. I have educated myself quite a bit and love it when the sales dude runs up to me at Best Buy or whereever and ask me if I have any questions. Of course I ask him a question I already know the answer to see if he/she has a clue. Most of the time I can tell they don't know what they are talking about and shy away from me to avoid any more "hard" questions. Once and a while I run into some whiz kid that is very helpful though. I am holding out for the new Aquos next month and will be sure whatever I buy its 1080P.

[tdti1]

Imaging getting DirectTV with 220 channels of HD!!!

WOW!

I would rather not, since there SD is so bad looking and there HD is very washed out I can not imagine how much they would compress there HD if they had that many channels, If HD hit hard I would go with cable or stick with my big dish, cable will have a very large amount of bandwidth open up as soon as they go to a all digital platform in the next 2-3 years.

[terryfoster]

...My main concern is I want a TV that supports 1080P. Why spend thousands on a tv that does not support it since this is no doubt what everyone will eventually have....I am holding out for the new Aquos next month and will be sure whatever I buy its 1080P.
Please be aware that even if the HDTV has a 1080p native resolution, most don't support 1080p input. The PS3 is said to have backed out of 1080p support due to the video processing required. Since HDTV has been around since at least 1998 it has taken broadcasters nearly 8 years to adopt the 720p or 1080i formats. I imagine it will take that long or probably longer for broadcasters to adopt 1080p. The possible exception here would be HD DVDs (of whatever format) which may support 1080p sooner.

Personally I wouldn't hold out for 1080p native HDTVs since the picture improvement is minimal and they are usually cost prohibitive.

Save your money and get a 720p or 1080i HDTV. Imagine if you bought an HDTV in 1998, do you think you would want to replace it today after seeing the vast improvements in technology?

-Wow, resurrecting a 4 year old thread.

[Fore left!]

I would rather not, since there SD is so bad looking and there HD is very washed out I can not imagine how much they would compress there HD if they had that many channels, If HD hit hard I would go with cable or stick with my big dish, cable will have a very large amount of bandwidth open up as soon as they go to a all digital platform in the next 2-3 years.


I think the next best bet would be when/if your local phone company introduces FTTP to your neighborhood.

[vansmack]

Terry,

Thanks for your insight. Getting back to the point of this thread, I think this is one of the reasons there has been so much resistance going to HDTV. It has this but not that, it's 1080P but can't except the signal, etc....Very confusing for the common man. One more question. I understand that the 1080P's currently on the market are native, but cannot except the signal when it becomes available. But from what I have reasearched this year "true" 1080P's are hitting the market that will be able to. How do you tell the difference in the specs??? The new Sharp 45 in LCD-45D90U is hitting the market soon and there web site just says its full 1080P. Not sure is this is more of the same or the whole chabang. Thanks.

[kevinw]

vansmack,

1080p is this years new thing-last year it was fixed Pixel-Before that it was 720p, before that was HDMI vs DVI and before that it was widescreen vs 4:3..
Crt is almost gone and 1080p is waste of money..Better to either buy 720p-LCD,DLP or even plasma and wait 2-3 years for 1080p sets that can accept as well as display.. UNLESS of course you want to be bleeding edge.

The resistance had been lack of programming and availability of stations. Now that nearly everyone has some form of HD programming available and HD programming quite common place and the prices of displays dropping to all time lows, I expext there to be a HD tv in a majority of homes. If not for HD but at least DVD viewing.

[kevinw]

What's more interesting is read some of the earlier post from 2002.. Heck that is when the thought the transition to all digital would be this year and FOX was still 480p and fighting HD becuase it was not worth it to them.