Apple's Moment — Consumers Want To Download To TV

ack154 writes, "With so much recent news surrounding Apple's upcoming iTV system, their timing may be nearly perfect. Ars Technica gives the rundown on a recent report, released from Accenture, stating that about half of users surveyed across the globe are now looking to get downloadable videos, movies and other content onto their TV. Based on the article, if Apple can get the right combination in features, price, and usability, many consumers may be ready to eat it up. Macworld has more speculation on Apple's potential living room dominance."

Comments

Re:Apple's biggest challenge: wireless LAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Rumors suggest the iTV has a hard drive. That takes care of all your latency problems.

Re:It really does work.

[conigs]

Ah, the resolution conversation.

First of all, the actual resolution of a DVD image is 720x480 NTSC and 720x576 PAL. The displayed resolution, however, can vary depending on how you want to interpolate pixels. The common 640x480 is used because it contains all the vertical resolution of an NTSC signal, and squishes the horizontal resolution to display properly in square pixels. This is the equivalent of display a PAL image at 720x540. Oddly enough, if you display an NTSC signal by stretching out the vertical resolution instead of squishing the horizontal resolution, you also get 720x540, but with interpolated pixels. PAL would be 768x576.

The 1024 res you mention is for 16:9 anamorphic image. Do you know why the call it anamorphic? Because the actual signal is 720x576. The image needs to be stretched out to display properly. For NTSC this would be 853x480.

But I see after writing all this, that you did mention square pixel resolution. So I guess this post is rather useless. However, 640x480 isn't that low res if you have an NTSC DVD player, especially considering I'd have to either throw out or interpolate information to to display it properly on a square pixel display. But let's not get into a PAL vs NTSC flame-war. I personally hate them both for different reasons.