Remember when HD was the new kid on the block, and everyone liked it but few could afford it? Those days seem to be fast-disappearing, at least according to some, even with the formal transition still six months away.
The New York Times, in an Aug. 18 story lauding the all-HD aspects of NBC Universal’s Olympics coverage in Beijing, ended its own observations with the declaration, “High-definition TV is no longer a luxury option. It’s standard.”
There are others who proclaim HD is becoming more the norm than the exception (still technically untrue, for the moment). Cable One, in an FCC petition related to the deployment of set-top boxes, flatly asserted that HD should no longer be considered an “advanced” cable service because “virtually every network is available in HD [and] virtually every new TV purchased is HD-capable…”
Still, nearly two-thirds of all U.S. homes do not yet have HD—and even the optimistically inclined Consumer Electronics Association predicts that somewhere less than half of all households (47 percent) will have at least one HD set by early 2009.
