Nielsen: HD Sets in Over Three Quarters of U.S. Homes

[recto101]

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/ar..._Sets_in_Over_Three_Quarters_of_U_S_Homes.php

Yet 71% of primetime broadcast viewing still done in standard definition

Which DMA's still air primetime broadcast viewing still done in standard definition

I do know the Network O&O's in Large cities absolutely air in HD signal.

 

[nathannah]

The problem is that the education campaign for HDTV has been terrible. I know a cousin who bought a new HDTV but thinks the cable channels in the lower numbers are automatically HD just by plugging in the cable, when they're just watching the ugly stretched out analog or digitally encoded for a 4:3 picture and the 600 HD tier 'repeats' the channels. And I see way too many restaurants and bars which think the same thing; plug in the TV and instant HD, not the stretched out letterboxed CNN they actually get. Only in the places where a halfway competent worker who knows what HD is do you see an HD signal.

Another thing is the terrible cable DVR's stuck with a 2004-sized 80GB hard drive. Viewers can only fit in 12-20 hours of HD on there, so they choose instead to record in SD to save space, or they have a lifetime TiVo series 1 or 2 with lifetime service they'll keep running until the motherboard is set on fire.

Finally, the holdouts bound to wring everything they can from their CRT set before they move to new technology. Though I think many of them do at least watch the HD channels downgraded to 480i because it still looks better on there.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

Virtually all of the Big 4 networks' affiliates air the programs in HD. The question, as mrschimpf indicates, is how the viewers have their set configured.

To his point, I was visiting my grandparents at labor day. They replaced a dead CRT with a 42" flat screen this summer. I pointed out that they get some of their cable channels in HD, and they said they couldn't tell the difference.

Granted, my 80-something grandparents aren't the best judges of picture quality

 

[nomadcowatbk]

people also don't punch extra numbers on the remote and just watch the 1 or 2 digital channels they're familiar with

 

[Skynet74]

I have a friend who just bought his first HDTV a couple of weeks ago. He said the cable company told him he needs a box for basic cable channels. I told him that they lied to him. I have three HDTV's hooked up without a box. He responded that his brother said the same thing as the cable company. He needs a box. I felt like beating my head against the wall. Clearly the cable company takes advanatage of the fact that many people aren't familiar with HDTV and will just flat out lie to customers by telling them that they need a box when they actually don't. So whatever. I don't care. My friend can just keep paying extra money if he doesn't want to believe me. Silly!

 

[FreddyE1977]

Great opportunity though for companies that make boxes with two AA batteries
and some blinking LEDs in them...

 

[gbranch]

I know a cousin who bought a new HDTV but thinks the cable channels in the lower numbers are automatically HD just by plugging in the cable, when they're just watching the ugly stretched out analog or digitally encoded for a 4:3 picture and the 600 HD tier 'repeats' the channels.

Before they switched from cable to Directv my parents would do this constantly. I would go to their house, and they would be watching a football game on analog ESPN on their 40" LCD. I would say, "You know, this game is in HD." switch over to digital ESPN-HD, and voila. "Oh, that's much better" they would say. Next week, the same thing. I think that this was because they could remember that ESPN was on channel 18, and had been for 20+ years, but could not remember the 200 tier HD channel number and would not take the time to try and find it. Personally, I can hardly watch SD programming anymore and will only do it if if what I want to watch is SD only.

I suspect that cable viewers are much more likely to watch SD programming on HD sets than sat viewers simply because of the way that the technolgies work and the fact that the sat providers don't have traditional analog channels.

 

[fybush]

I have a friend who just bought his first HDTV a couple of weeks ago. He said the cable company told him he needs a box for basic cable channels. I told him that they lied to him. I have three HDTV's hooked up without a box. He responded that his brother said the same thing as the cable company. He needs a box. I felt like beating my head against the wall. Clearly the cable company takes advanatage of the fact that many people aren't familiar with HDTV and will just flat out lie to customers by telling them that they need a box when they actually don't. So whatever. I don't care. My friend can just keep paying extra money if he doesn't want to believe me. Silly!

I don't know what cable company your friend has...but I don't know of any cable company out there that makes their entire basic lineup (including HD services) available on ClearQAM. Here in upstate New York, Time Warner Cable makes only the local broadcast channels and PEG channels available in ClearQAM. So without a box, you get only six HD channels, a dozen or so SD digital channels and about 50 SD analog channels, and the number of SD channels keeps dropping as they pull down more analog service to make room for more digital channels.

I would rather pay for a box to watch actual HD (on nearly 150 channels now available to me) than suffer with upconverted SD.

As for the "SD is channel 18, and I have to remember that HD is channel 764" problem, that recently went away on my system: at least with the box, most of the one- and two-digit channels now remap to their HD services instead of their SD channels. I have to remember now that I can see CBS in HD on "8" instead of "1008"!

 

[flytrap]

The cable viewers who continue to watch SD "Stretch-o-vision" is a pet peeve of mine. and the sad thing is that they pay over $100 a month for it. Most of the time they are watching broadcast channels on it which are available for free with an antenna. My mother has an HDTV without cable and visitors are often shocked to see how clear it looks over the air and not stretched. and are surprised that she is able to get frees stuff like Create, This, Me, Antenna, Bounce, weather and more without paying a dime for it. Its like they don't know that free TV exists, much less HDTV. another pet peeve is that cable companies will hide their HD channels on some odd number that old people can't find. The HD channel should be placed on the same channel that the SD channel is on. It the station ID's itself as "channel 3" it should be on channel 3 or something close, NOT channel 286. They need to dump all these duplicate SD channels and only carry the HD only channels. Reserve the SD stuff for subchannels and cable channels that don't have an HD feed. I'm not sure what the current stats are, but several years ago that the vast majority of HDTV owners were only watching analog or SD programming on them and were completely unaware that they could be watching a pristine HD picture on it. for free even. The stretch-O-vision in resturants and bars is especially annoying. even worse when they use the zoom button and try to crop a 4:3 picture and make widescreen out of it. The resoulution will be terrible and it cuts everyones head off.

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

The cable viewers who continue to watch SD "Stretch-o-vision" is a pet peeve of mine. and the sad thing is that they pay over $100 a month for it. Most of the time they are watching broadcast channels on it which are available for free with an antenna. My mother has an HDTV without cable and visitors are often shocked to see how clear it looks over the air and not stretched. and are surprised that she is able to get frees stuff like Create, This, Me, Antenna, Bounce, weather and more without paying a dime for it. Its like they don't know that free TV exists, much less HDTV. another pet peeve is that cable companies will hide their HD channels on some odd number that old people can't find. The HD channel should be placed on the same channel that the SD channel is on. It the station ID's itself as "channel 3" it should be on channel 3 or something close, NOT channel 286. They need to dump all these duplicate SD channels and only carry the HD only channels. Reserve the SD stuff for subchannels and cable channels that don't have an HD feed. I'm not sure what the current stats are, but several years ago that the vast majority of HDTV owners were only watching analog or SD programming on them and were completely unaware that they could be watching a pristine HD picture on it. for free even. The stretch-O-vision in resturants and bars is especially annoying. even worse when they use the zoom button and try to crop a 4:3 picture and make widescreen out of it. The resoulution will be terrible and it cuts everyones head off.

I agree--but I can't see the day coming in the near future where SD versions of channels will be dropped entirely in favor of their HD counterparts (maybe at least 5 years or so from now). I can see some cable companies dropping the SD versions of certain cable channels on higher package tiers (e.g., NFL Network, Fox Business, MLB Network) and only carrying the HD channels for those networks. Then eventually all but the Limited Basic and non-HD channels will be SD only.

But in the meantime, here's a modest proposal: on digital cable, realign the lineups so that the SD channels (and those with no HD counterpart at this time) run from 1-499, then 500-999 is all HD (including having all PPV and On-Demand channels go HD only). The HD channel numbers should be the SD number + 500: e.g., if this happened in my area ABC on SD 2 would be 502 on HD, CBS SD 3/HD 503, CNN SD 26/HD 526, Fox Business SD 410/HD 910. Or better yet, to give people an incentive to go HD, flip the above proposal and move all HD channels to 1-499, then remaining SD to 500-999.

 

[Darth_vader]

"My mother has an HDTV without cable and visitors are often shocked to see how clear it looks over the air and not stretched. They are surprised that she is able to get free programming like Create, THIS, ME-TV, Antenna, Bounce, weather and more without giving anybody a dime for it. It's like they don't know that free TV exists, much less HDTV."

That's the intention. The corporate pay-television world doesn't want people to know about beneficial things like this. They want the public to keep coughing up money month after month after month after month after month after month after month after month for their crappy, bit-starved fourth or fifth-generation signals. If enough people knew that higher-quality programming was available over the air for free, the pay-television companies would lose money. Which, actually, wouldn't be such a horrible thing when you think about it.

"The 'Stretch-O-Vision' in restaurants and bars is especially annoying. Even worse is when they use the zoom button and try to crop a 4*3 picture to make a 'widescreen' picture of it. The resoulution is terrible and everyone's heads get cut off."

An "HD" set alone does not an HD picture make.

The Red Robin property I used to work at installed widescreen LCD monitors a couple years ago, connected to the big, full-size Motorola QAM/pay cable receivers through just the composite video line. Ugly, ugly "Stretch-O-Vision" picture, but the manager/my former boss, D--, swore up and down it was all "HD". When I went in one day to pick up lunch for somebody about a month after they were installed, I offered to hook them up again, for free even, the *right* way using the HDMI interfaces. He wasn't particularly moved by my offer and told me the current setup "worked well enough". Oh well, it's their loss, not mine.

Well, I guess that's why the world has devices like this.

 

[kickass367]

I have a friend who just bought his first HDTV a couple of weeks ago. He said the cable company told him he needs a box for basic cable channels. I told him that they lied to him. I have three HDTV's hooked up without a box. He responded that his brother said the same thing as the cable company. He needs a box. I felt like beating my head against the wall. Clearly the cable company takes advanatage of the fact that many people aren't familiar with HDTV and will just flat out lie to customers by telling them that they need a box when they actually don't. So whatever. I don't care. My friend can just keep paying extra money if he doesn't want to believe me. Silly!

I don't know what cable company your friend has...but I don't know of any cable company out there that makes their entire basic lineup (including HD services) available on ClearQAM. Here in upstate New York, Time Warner Cable makes only the local broadcast channels and PEG channels available in ClearQAM. So without a box, you get only six HD channels, a dozen or so SD digital channels and about 50 SD analog channels, and the number of SD channels keeps dropping as they pull down more analog service to make room for more digital channels.

I would rather pay for a box to watch actual HD (on nearly 150 channels now available to me) than suffer with upconverted SD.

As for the "SD is channel 18, and I have to remember that HD is channel 764" problem, that recently went away on my system: at least with the box, most of the one- and two-digit channels now remap to their HD services instead of their SD channels. I have to remember now that I can see CBS in HD on "8" instead of "1008"!

In the end QAM tuners it seems have been made useless thanks to the bought out FCC. Besides the people that really want to learn how to use their HDTVs properly will learn, the ones that don't and refuse to do so...well that's their loss.

 

[kenglish]

Clear QAM tuners aren't totally "useless", but they are pretty much so in the world of commercial cable systems.
They can still serve a purpose in unencrypted MATV systems, where you might want to use 100+ RF channels (especially if you tier those channels using filters, and want some "empty" ones for guard-bands).

Sad thing is that Cable Card never really took off. That allowed you to use your set's QAM tuner, and the Cable Company just rented you the box "on a card", rather than as a separate stand-alone unit.