<< While on the Subject of HDTV Dept.: For some odd reason, I feel disgusted and at the same time vindicated by the most recent fiasco regarding HDTV. I have been skeptical of this rollout and urging caution since it was first proposed as an analog system requiring expensive gallium arsenide circuits to work. It appears that the new copy-protection schemes being dreamed up by Hollywood will make every single HDTV set sold to date obsolete. And buyers of new sets are not being told about this situation in a dubious attempt to dump very expensive inventory. I'm sure those of you who spent $5,000 to $10,000 for what may become an albatross are going to love reading this.
What happened was that the Hollywood folks, who are just freaked over the possibility that we'll be copying HDTV movies, have promoted copy protection that requires the decode circuit to be built into the display, not into the set-top box. This requires the set-top box to send a signal to a connector that new HDTV sets will have. If you're thinking of buying an HDTV, don't, unless it has this connector and circuit?whenever they are finalized. I suspect that this copy protection mechanism will be used for certain broadcasts, too, since there has been a lot of talk about copy-protecting DSS and other transmissions.
The concept is that when copy protection is put within the circuitry of the display, you can't decode something with a set-top box and then grab the signal as it comes out of the box and before it gets to the screen.
Meanwhile, the HDTV-promoting Consumer Electronics Association is going to eat crow if all the current HDTV sets turn out to be white elephants. I see no evidence that this mess will be resolved without a lot of burned consumers. All the Hollywood studios are belatedly demanding the new system. I suppose an expensive retrofit could be developed, but it probably won't be. Nothing is designed nowadays for fixing or retrofitting.
And I'm guessing that those expensive set-top boxes will also have to be replaced. According to most sources, all the latest schemes allow copy-protected broadcasts and movies to be viewed on the old HDTV sets, but they will fall back to lower resolution. Welcome to the bleeding edge. Anyone even thinking of getting HDTV before this issue is completely resolved is just throwing money away. Funny how your local newspaper or TV station hasn't been covering this consumer issue, isn't it?
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This is from John Dvoraks latest column.
he seems to think they will all be obsolete.
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