P3D Re: The cost of HDTV

["Norm in S.F." <normlehf@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am not sure this (quoted below) is true.

TV sets last an awfully long time these days. I have a ten-year-old,
20-inch
NEC that is still going strong.

When the mandatory shut-down of the NTSC transmitters begins, the
viewing public
is going to scream bloody murder at being forced to replace perfectly
good hardware
because of government edict. This will be particularly true if the
broadcasters
elect to transmit more channels instead of HDTV.

For the forseeable future, HDTV home hardware will predominantly be for
playback
of commercially recorded material--not for broadcast or cable channels.
(Many 
cables, BTW, are so far not committing to carrying the HDTV signals.)

The BBC (granted a politically-driven rather than market-driven system)
maintained
405-line transmissions long after the introduction of PAL color
transmissions.

Tony Shapps, or somebody, can help us out here, but I think the 405-line
transmissions
continued well into the '70s.

Norm Lehfeldt

Marvin Jones wrote:
>
> A friend of mine manages one of the largest television syndication
> distributors in the world, and he tells me that as many as half of all his
> clients (local television stations) are seriously looking at going out of
> business because they simply cannot afford the immense cost of converting
> to HDTV. Between HDTV and cable, I think we're going to see a LOT of local
> independent TV stations going under in the next few years.


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