On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 1:15 PM, Ronn! Blankenship < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Nope. I'm talking about people like Nick's little old lady, whom > (I'm guessing) does not have cable (If not her specifically, there > are millions like her who don't.) and who has to sometime in the next > 9.5 months make another trip to the store and fork over part of her > Social Security check to buy at least a converter box (not free even > with the coupons) if she wants to keep watching the news or > whatever. Obviously of course the corporate folks hope she and the > millions like her will start subscribing to cable and replace her > old, perfectly functional TV with a new HD set in order to keep > watching whatever they watch.
In fact, we don't have cable and I hardly watch any TV at all -- it's been four years since I decided it was generally a no-win activity -- but we have an HD antenna on the roof, I have an HD receiver card in a media computer and a few weeks ago I bought, using one of those gummint-issued coupons (more like a debit card), a converter box. I didn't realize all the features that HD would bring... channel guide (very basic) and such, V-chip capabilities (not sure I really like that, but oh boy, now I can block Canadian broadcasts) and the picture is darn good. And now I pick up three or four times as many channels... but at least a third of them are in languages I don't speak. The other two-thirds haven't changed much from when I did watch. I use the media PC to record -- in HD -- home improvement shows (This Old House and such) and what has become my one surrender to voyeurism, "Cops." And the occasional movie, but it seems like 80 percent of the movies broadcast around here are in Spanish. I am much more willing to watch time-shifted television. Not so much because I can skip ads, but because I feel like my time is my own again. I was a real skeptic about HD -- I tended to think like Nick Negroponte (MIT Media Lab), who said something like we don't need more pixels, we need more intelligence. I'm still skeptical, but at least we're not wasting all that bandwidth on TV. We'll waste in on something else, I suppose. Nick -- Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] Messages: 408-904-7198 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
