North The Battle over Downloads — Michael Himowitz at the baltimore Sun does an excellent job of outlining the state-of-the-state regarding downloading TV and movies over the net. Please read it in its entirety.
But two things startled me. One was the technical quality of the recording – sharper, clearer and more like a DVD movie than anything I’d ever snatched off the air. “That’s because it was an HDTV broadcast,” my friend explained. Minus the commercials, of course – whoever posted the episode on the Internet had thoughtfully removed them.
The second element was the size of the video file on my friend’s hard disk – about 400 megabytes. True, that’s a decent chunk of an 80-gigabyte hard drive, but for an hour of high-def video, it’s tiny: just over half the space available on a CD and only a fraction of the real estate available on DVD.
Kind of negative [undeservedly] towards the end. Sounded like he “discovered” his preconception.
The funny thing about the HDTV broadcast issues is that to me, it is pretty much of a moot point…
First off, what percentage of TV watching is actually done via over-the-air broadcast these days? Cable and/or satellite is how the majority of people get their “broadcast” television these days, not over the air. Since all cable and sat systems (now, or will soon) show the HDTV versions of the “broadcast stations”, which TV watcher will really care about over the air signals? Will there be many (or any!) consumers that will only receive HDTV over-the-air signals on their bran spaken new HDTV monitor and not have a cable box or sat dish?
The right thing to do is forget all about this over-the-air HDTV thing, let the broadcast stations continue to use the regular VHF bands, and use the new spectrum for something truly useful and beneficial to society.
Intresting Read
One ridiculous thing done by the FCC was they required all TVs to be capable of showing HDTV broadcasts, outlawing the cheaper TV sets. Since when does the FCC have the right to promote a new technology with government mandates?