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Originally Posted by Psycho Dad
According to this link:
Looks like you have a little more time. At one time I had a FCC article that outlined what was to happen when but I can't find it now. I went through all this BS this summer when shopping for a TV. One thing I can tell you is most of the TV salesmen are either uninformed or not telling the truth.
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well, yeah, salespeople in general are full of shit. the entire field of sales is the art of trying to convince people to buy shit they don't need. now, should you determine that you want this thing you don't need anyway, you still have to go in with the assumption that they are full of shit because they aren't trained any better, and do the research yourself.
and yeah again, the whole HDTV thing is a massive travesty.
-most people don't have and don't care about having HDTV
-out of the people who have bought an HDTV, a significant fraction of them think they do but don't actually watch anything in HD because they're entirely clueless about how to go about getting HD programming into their TVs, and may not even know what HD looks like, thanks to retail stores being equally clueless, or they can't tell the difference from SD anyway!
-in order to fit in more programming, cable companies and broadcasters digitally compress the hell out of the video streams such that they look like high-resolution shit
-instead of making one damn HDTV standard, they go and make 720p AND 1080i, thus screwing over all HDTV owners except those with CRTs, because the TV has to do upsampling or downsampling half the time to fit the picture into its one native resolution! then the obvious next move is to go to 1080p, which is handily done by people who don't have to worry about signal bandwidth like video game console manufacturers, thus instantly obsoleting everyone's new HDTV that doesn't support it!
-in their neverending quest to be a bunch of assholes who screw over the public for profit, "content" owners push for and get new digital restrictions management called HDCP, again instantly obsoleting everyone's HDTV that doesn't support it! not to mention the broadcast flag! we managed to stop the broadcast flag on a technicality last time, but it's only a matter of time before Hollywood buys off enough (presumably Democratic now) Congressmen and women to get it mandated by law. jesus. digital technology should be and is often great, but it's just sad how easily it gets twisted (see also DMCA) to serve the ends of evil men.