AP – Doug Bates and his wife, Stacey, were in bed around 10 p.m., their 2-year-old daughters asleep in a nearby room. Suddenly they were shaken awake by the wail of police sirens and the rumble of a helicopter above their suburban Southern California home. A criminal must be on the loose, they thought.
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“Ah, is that the Boticelli Venus hanging there in your living room?” “Yes, but let’s watch the SuperBowl so wait just a moment while I push this button to make the painting roll up and reveal my flat screen television!”
My friend and colleague Bruce Berkoff likes to refer to the WAF of flat panel TVs in the home: the Wife Acceptance Factor. (I adhere to the more context appropriate and inclusive SOFA: Significant Other Factor of Acceptance.) Try as hard as they might, TV manufacturers have yet to come up with a design that doesn’t cause at least one home decorator to declare that “you’re not hanging that ugly hunk of plastic in this room, buster!” Well, Media Decor has come up with a new solution to the problem.
Their new Ecco Series lets you pair a picture frame with a work of art, ranging from Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus ” to contemporary abstracts. You pick from four different frame colors, and choose between two sizes, and voila! You get your own customized solution. An RF remote control lets you wind the painting up or down, and the frame is battery powered so there is no wiring required.
Hiding your flat screen behind a painting starts at just under $1,500, which means that it could cost more than twice as much as the TV you put behind it, but for some folks, that’s a small price to pay to keep the home decorator happy.
No surprise here, really. InStat reported this week that 17 million of the more than 39 million U.S. households with at least one HDTV set do not have an HDTV signal source. That’s a little more than two out of every five. Now the good news is, I suppose, that a couple of years ago the estimate was that only half of the HDTV households had HDTV, so this does indicate a small gain.
But what’s going on here? The answer is that these new flat screen televisions look so much better than old picture tube TVs — especially with a digital signal from cable, satellite, or a DVD player — that it’s good enough for the average viewer. Most people think that watching a DVD on an HDTV is HDTV image because it looks so good. (And besides, they spent the extra for the 1080p upconverting DVD player, so it has to make it HD, right? Nope; standard DVDs are standard definition, no matter what you do to them.)
It’s really a shame that so many people aren’t taking advantage of the extra resolution that they paid for in their new HDTV sets. The fact is that HD programming does not have to cost more; it’s free with over-the-air broadcasts from all full-power television stations (at least, for those shows that are broadcast in HD). And if you have a digital cable service, you should be able to connect your TV directly to the cable without a settop box and get some HD channels. (You need the set top box for the scrambled premium channels, but you should be able to access the basic channels this way.)
There’s one more implication in this news, and that’s bad news for Blu-ray. If HDTV owners don’t care about whether they have an HD signal for their sets, they are not going to be rushing out to buy the HD Blu-ray players. And I don’t see this situation changing any time soon.
You’re in the living room with your “significant other” watching a movie or TV show or sports event on your beautiful big flat panel HDTV, and then one of you decides that you’d like a snack from the kitchen, which is the next room. Do you pause the show (if it’s a movie or you’ve got a DVR or equivalent service that will let you do that) or does the person leaving the room just lose out? If you’ve got a TV in the kitchen, you’ve got a third choice: send the show to that TV at the same time.
All you need is an HDMI splitter (assuming that your source — DVD player, DVR, or set top box — has HDMI connectors) that will let you connect two TVs to the same source. Then you can stay current with the show as you go back and forth to raid the refrigerator. And the single cable will carry the sound as well as the video image. Note that you can run long cables for HDMI connections, though you may need to invest in a high quality cable or additional hardware if you go farther than 20 to 30 feet.
Well, it looks as though the U.S. Congress is going to delay the transition to digital television broadcasts, and I’ve already made my position clear on why that’s not a good idea. Nielsen reported new numbers last week on about how many households remain unprepared for the end of analog broadcasts, and the results provide support for both camps on the issue.
According to Nielsen, 6.5 million households remain completely unprepared for the switch to digital-only broadcasts. That number is down from 7.8 million a month earlier in December 2008, and down even more from the May 2008 mark of 10.7 million. For those in favor of the delay, this signals a possible acceleration of those getting ready for the switch. It also supports the position that 6.5 million is too many, and the federal phone banks could only handle calls from about one out of 20 of a day for that many those households. This is sure to leave millions frustrated and unhappy with their loss of television service.
On the other hand, those opposing the delay could argue that four months will not be enough to reach most of those who remain unprepared, as many of them either cannot afford to get ready, or are not capable of dealing with the problem for any number of reasons. The delay will only cost taxpayers and businesses money, and in the end, we will still have millions of U.S. TV households that will still be completely unready.
That’s the beauty of statistics and other information; they can tell you what the situation is, but they can’t tell you what is the right decision to make.
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