But I wasn't talking about 70% of the US households or population. Even 5% of the total US households is significant enough to justify billions of dollars of investment. It was an answer to this:

Actually, even 1% of the US households is a large market for HDTV development, surely not for GM or IBM, but it was enough for LG, Samsung, and many other small South Korean companies. It's surely better to have 100% market share than 1% but if CDFreaks doesn't represent the United States, it doesn't represent the world, either. By saying "... US is the largest HDTV market in the world even now...", I actually meant just millions of units, not 100 million or 100 billion. I was mainly saying about people who dare to burn hundreds of CD and DVD blank disks just for personal entertainment. Over 99% of the world's population hardly care about such things. None of my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles uses a PC, and never used a PC, but I still say 100Mbps home internet has been in South Korea for years for practically everyone.

85% HDTV market penetration doesn't exist in any Asian country by the way. In South Korea, currently most of the big and small cities have HDTV but digital TVs here are yet expensive compared to China and US (like 2x more) and there are too few HD channels. In general, US is still leading the world regarding HDTV because that's where more movies and TV programs are produced and more people consume and entertain. And it's really the decisions from the executives of Dell and HP that finally made Sony and Matsushita to start Blu-ray seriously and Dell and HP only act on the account of their domestic US customers.

AVKorea.co.kr is one of South Korea's HD-related websites and most people who post there are relatively rich people who gladly spend thousands to tens of thousands on audio and video that most South Korean workers can only envy.

The broadcast DTV in the US is severely hampered by being on UHF bands. Weak signals, weather fade and loss of signal are commonplace, especially for HDTV channels. The future of HDTV depends on the cable and satellite providers, who are seriously dragging feet on implimentation because 1: they don't have to do anything, and 2: the needed bandwidth is too costly and would force them to give up hundreds of channels of profitable crap like shopping channels and specialty channels. The US govt's attempts to force broadcasters to switch to DTV will fail as it is currently planned. Something like another 5-10 years will be needed.

The vast rural landscape here is served only by a huge system of thousands of small analog VHF and UHF repeaters that cannot broadcast DTV, much less HDTV. Add to that the fact that many people only buy a TV when one breaks, and lifespans of 10-15 years are common for TV's.

So all things considered, the real problem here is the failure of cable and satellite providers to invest in HDTV. It will eventually happen with innovations like MPEG-4, but the process will be slow, much slower than expected. HDTV will remain a high-end specialty market for several more years.

Low cost HDTV sets will help, but until the broadcast problems are resolved, there's won't be any switch to an all-digital system. It's also important to diferentiate between DTV and HDTV. Even now, some stations are broadcasting "EDTV" in 16:9, not HDTV. The difference is obvious, but it takes less bandwidth so it may well be the chosen format in broadcasting.

That sounds like why FTTH internet isn't used widely in the US even though it costs practically nothing (well, compared to buying fighter planes and oil...) But even then, there's no place like the US yet. Most digital TVs sold in South Korea are still SD. I have to pay over US$20 per month just for one HD channel. People with the largest HD collections here usually get theirs downloaded via VDSL and FTTH, not satellite or cable or air. They also "distribute" among themselves using D-VHS and HDDs. Imagine a lan party where people exchange HDDs full of HDTV contents.

kenshin, i think we're in agreement...

this was the point of my post:

That's straight to the point and I hope til the WM2006 here in germany this will beome finally "the standard" for HDTV in europe >>> HDTV as mpeg4 transmission.

Well, it took like one decade for the music industry to acknowledge MP3... (based on MPEG-1), or maybe it's even worse now since I could get CD-R disks full of MP3 albums in 1995 but not in 2005 (more than 20GB MP3 albums on my HDDs right now downloaded from LG Telecom but unusable because I changed my subscription from LGT to KT two months ago.) HDTV MPEG-4 is so unlikely to happen in South Korea, but it's surely more economical because processors able to do that are now cheaper than the required bandwidth for HDTV MPEG-2. I have a Sanyo VPC-C1 and it uses MPEG-4 to record in 640*480 30fps to SD memory because it's cheaper to have a more powerful processor in the camera than to have bigger SD memory cards, but are those running the movie and TV industries that knowledgeable?

The funny thing is: Because europe (and especially germany) is so far behind the normal progress about HDTV, the Soccer WorldCup in 2006 would give "the once-in-a-lifetime" chance to jump onto the ship and make some progress in this case... Using mpeg4 with HDTV instead of tech-obsolete mpeg2.
At least HD1 (Euro1080) will launch programs simultan in mpeg2 and mpeg4 here - that's a start.
And bandwith is a big point even in the digital (sat)world.

The future will tell...

I didn't know about that worldcup to be held in Germany next year. Last worldcup was held in Japan and South Korea. It was also the first time South Korea nationaly went HD. Governments, people, TV stations, electronics companies all supported HDTV all of a sudden because they all wanted South Korean players in the best screen quality, silly maybe but effective for progress (and it's also true Samsung and LG used nationalism and patriotism to persuade the stations, governments, and the consumers to move into HD.) The only thing that really delayed HDTV in South Korea was politics about the US influence because right in June 2002, the same time while Worldcup games were held, there was an accident north of Seoul regarding the US Army. TV stations were by then mostly dominated by left-wing (pro-North and anti-US in general) and so they fanatically objected US HD standard and tried to persuade everyone how superior European standard is o US standard. After all, consensus among the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC), electronics industry (Samsung and LG), and various experts (mostly more interested in steadily growing economy and technologies than bloody US-bashing) won.

South Korea has had HDTV as one of the top 10 (or maybe 9 or 11) national hi-tech projects since in the 1980s and it accelerated as LG acquired Zenith and started working with Philips and Samsung got rich due to success with DRAMs.

Using MPEG-4 for HDTV broadcasting is very interesting. Can I download the Worldcup 2006 games captured in HDTV format? (HD .tp files were rather large to backup using DVD disks in 2002, 4-5 disks for 2-hour 1920*1080 MPEG-2 video.)

I still think it's too soon to release this stuff, people are just starting to dump their VHS out and going into DVD, it's too soon, for Me I think they are gonna sell terribly, it's too soon

That sounds TERRIFIC to me. Scary.


Yep, approximately 4 or 5 DVD discs I had to use to store a normal movie recorded in 1080p here (via dvb-s).
If there is a chance I'll record all that stuff in a HDTV format (prefer 1080p of course) and would spread it if required...
But by this time it's a bit too early to make nails for that.

It only depends on who you are and how you use your hardware and software. For some people, USB-booting seems to be common. People are not one group. There are rich people and poor people. I personally belong to the poor and low class compared to most people who post on CDFreaks forum boards, perhaps belong to the 1% of the poorest group.

Threads like this is really for early adopters. If Blu-ray and HD-DVD were going to "happen" right within the new several months, CDFreaks.com would have had at least five new forums dedicated to Blu-ray and HD-DVD PC drives and standalone recorders. CDFreaks.com still has most of the forums dedicated to CD and DVD hardware and software because it will take a few years for the big transition. It was the same in 2001 and 2002 when only a small percentage of CDFreaks visitors were eagerly interested in DVD recording (which was the only reason I visited sites like CDFreaks.com and CDRLabs.com in early 2002.) If you look at those who are mainly using DVD recorders, you might feel there are enough people for the DVD recordable market. If you are mainly with VHS people, you might feel there are only people who are going to stick to VHS for more years to come. People who have many friends watching HDTV might feel HDTV is already mainstream. People who don't have friends and neighbors accustomed to 24-hour-on internet might feel having at least one 10Gbps internet connection on every room and wall and consumer device like refrigerator and TV in every home for the six billion population of the world is only for the dreamer's dreams.

Big manufacturers invest in and develop next-generation hardware and software because they predict they are going to make big profits from the early investment. Early adopters help them a lot which is rather like beta-testing for the Microsoft and Symantec but paying big money to the big companies rather than receiving test copies for free. They are aware of it but still pay and use newest hardware before the rest of the world population.

It will be interesting to see if it's HDD or DVD or Blu-ray or HD-DVD that is really replacing VHS and FDD. I think HDD's done more to it than the rest of those combined. This isn't the first time I mention this: In 1992, one CD-ROM disk medium offered about 5 to 30 times more than commonly found HDD and it was much cheaper to use 100 CD-ROM disks (for over 65,000MB) than to buy a few more 120MB HDDs. In 2005, one DVD-ROM disk holds 4,700,000,000 bytes of data which is not enough for storing one hour video in MPEG-2 1920*1080 but US$50 HDDs are enough for holding 20 hours of HD MPEG-2 video. The optical storage industry delayed transition to blue/violet laser because of the reluctance on the part of movie and music industries, broadstations, general consumers, and some powerful government (Bush and EU to name for examples) and the longer they do, the more market share will be going for media like FTTH and HDD. It's nice to witness technologies overwhelm and bypass the established. It's not too long ago that dial-up "modem" started to replace conventional PSTN phones for some people as the main medium for communication. Those phones and modems were later replaced with mobile phones with wireless internet and wall-plugged xDSL and FTTH.

Maybe "terrible" is a better choice. (Well, I'm a guy who learned the English language by preparing for TOEFL and GRE and reading Alvin Toffler, never learned the real-world English so I guess terrific may also be used.)

It was worse than scary then. Here's an informative book titled "China Hands" about East Asia.

Lilley's most stirring professional moment may have come during his 1986-88 ambassadorship to Korea, when he delivered a letter from President Reagan to Korean president Chun Doo Hwan that he believes helped avert a military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

Western people coming to East Asia for money and pleasure and DVD should read such books at least first (like the Philips employees in Taiwan working with BenQ people to develop DVD burners.)

You see.............. as I said in the begining, HD discs aren't a good thing!!!!
You have to buy everything new to wath these discs, as with DVD we only had to buy a DVD player.
Now, not even our new TFT monitors and new graphics cards with HD decoder will be able to play HD movies because of this stupid copy protection methods.

A Coat from 03/02/2006 news:
"As a result, even though most graphics cards such as current ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards are HDCP compliant, they are not HDCP ready and thus will not allow the viewing of HD protected content in its full resolution. At present, no BIOS updates are available to make any graphics card HD-Ready. On the other hand, even without a HDCP Ready monitor or graphics card, it may still be possible to watch HD copy protected content, but with tight to extreme restrictions. Microsoft's recommendation to incompliant hardware is either show a black screen or a picture with its resolution cut by 2 with some slight noise added, along with a message displayed to explain that the security requirements are not met and then show a black picture a moment later. Microsoft has relaxed the restriction on VGA due to it widespread use, however even still it will only allow up to a 960 x 540 max resolution picture to be shown, which is just a touch better than standard definition."

And what about that thing that when a HD player is pirated, new movies wont play in all the same HD players sold in the world, is this still going to appen? I buy a HD player, and someone hack it and because of that i will not be able to see new movies on it?! This is just to stupid to be true!!!!
So, i'll stick with my dvd's and my old faction 32" CRT television with great quality when comparing to this new crappy LCD TV's that only have good image when playing DVD's and HD TV, because i want to watch "normal" tv as well, and with LCD TV's the image gets really bad!!
I will not buy new TV's, HD Players and computer, when I have bought these things 2 years ago, and put these ones in to garbidge!!! Only to find out that HD discs have a lot more restrictions than DVD's, and only one advantage: better image quality in screens over 45".
Am I Wrong?! I know that in USA NTSC to 720p is a good jump, but here in Europe 720p is only a bit tiny better than PAL, so.....
What do You think?

PAL is 576 pixels by 480 pixels interlaced

720p is 1280 pixels by 720 pixels progressive

BIG difference!

What PAL do you mean?

PAL normally has 720x576.

Hmm well HDTV or not. I think the companys are pushing the issue to much. Most people will be happy with the upgrade from Analog to Digital transmissions, that is a huge quality booster, even though you watch the digital transmissions on a analog tv.

Better picture and sound, like watching a dvd movie. HDTV is probably for people with a dish, in cable tv networks we will have to wait maby 3-5 years. Plus the price on HDTV's are to high.

When prices come down on HDTV then the transmissions will start. Besides don't forget HDTV requires more space than digital TV as of now. Maby more development into HDTV and so on will get it out to PPL faster.

For me it is more important with digital TV and what channels you can get than if it's HDTV or not, I think most other consumers agree with that.

But for technology freaks HDTV is what you need right now

It's allways the consumers that drive the markets, products etc.

Here is a breakdown

Television Resolutions

LDTV 240i60, 288i50 (CIF)
SDTV 480i60 (NTSC), 480p30, 576i50 (PAL, SÉCAM), 576p25
EDTV 480p60, 576p50, 720i50, 720i60, 720p24, 720p25, 720p30
HDTV 720p50, 720p60, 1080p24, 1080p25, 1080p30, 1080i50, 1080i60

Regular PAL (4x3), the resolution you mention is PAL 16x9

PAL has 576 Lines
NTSC:480
HDTV 720 or 1080
So has i said from 480 to 720 is a 50% better but on PAL (576) is only 25% better!!!!
Only on 1080HDTV we are going to see a difference frokm PAL.
I agree that a change from analog to digital receivers is a big change, but that's already a reality in sattelite.
What i don't think that is going to appen is people changing from a dvd player 3/5 years old to an HD player. Dont forget that we had our VCR for more than 20 Years! We are not talking about computer market, where we buy new things every year, but consumer electronics products that have a longer life.
So, i think that for Tv, maybe we will have hd receivers, but only an HD tv on the livingroom, on the bedroom and so on, we will still have normal tv's with an hd receiver, and here we will not see big difference! But i think that we will stick with dvd's. The quality is good enought for a screen up to 45", and it does not have all that stuppid restrictions and DRM's like HD discs will have.

Yup, DRM and all similar crap will make these new techs suffer in agony...