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Widescreen TVs in the US?
Steeldrivin asks: "What's up with widescreen TV, in the US? If you go to the widescreen TV website for Philips, you'll see that they have a bunch of cool widescreen TVs...but only in Europe. The US catalog is devoid of widescreen products unless you want to spend $10,000 for a flat-screen plasma model. The catalog for Great Britain, on the other hand, has CRT-based 28" and 32" models, that are probably much more affordable.
As far as other manufacturers are concerned, the only widescreen models seem to be the more expensive plasma units, or huge projection TVs. What's up with this? When will the US get affordable widescreen TVs?" Philips' US catalog can be found here.
[Actually, I'm sillywiz@excession.demon.co.uk, but everytime I've ever tried to create an account it's failed...]
The licence fee that most Americans seem to regard as something archaic is partly what drives this stuff. The BBC for example just started doing both widescreen and digital broadcasts. Few people could receive them, but because they're not a commercial organisation they don't have to justify things the same way. Having the broadcasts means that the TV sets will sell and the tech gets bootstrapped that way. The US is more hamdstrung because no-one's going to start broadcasting until there are sets to watch it on and no one's going to buy a set without broadcasts. Unless they're rich, in which case they'll buy a TV for what most people spend on a car.
The BBC is a relatively massive organisation, it has large budgets, a worldwide audience and a remit to make the best television it can. It can afford to bear the "losses" of being a field leader, where commerical television simply couldn't.
Actually the decent widescreen TVs still aren't *THAT* cheap in the UK. The cheapest ones are maybe 4x the cost of similar spec normal TV, but the prices are dropping astonishingly fast - especially as digital takeup is picking up. I think I'm almost the last of my circle of friends to get digital... (I'm trying to watch less TV. I can't help but think that suddenly having 30 channels instead of 5 won't help.)
Britain also has the advantage of being smaller: there are less transmitters and equipment needed, we can be covered by one satalite's footprint. This just helps our TV market be more nimble.
Is it worth bothering to broadcast widescreen on execrable NTSC 525 line systems? Much about US consumer goods is so retro-third world. A dogdy cell-phone network, cookers that my mum would have thrown in the 50s and those weird upright washing machines with separate spin system that take up most of a small condo and need their own reservoir to fill, light switches made of Bakelite!!! America is so protectionist and isolationist that it is probably not worth Europeans exporting decent stuff.
Not necessarily. A channel can focus down to a particular niche, like Sci-fi fans or housewives, and can give advertisers the people they actually want to reach, as oppossed to a general channel that has to cater to everyone. So while there are fewer viewers per channel, the advertisers are willing to pay more because there reaching the right people.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
I think there is something wrong with having lots of channels : the more they are, the less audience each of them has, because the size of the market is still the same. And the less audience they get the more they show advertising to pay for the programs. And since they don't get as much money, they have to buy crappy programs and make endless reruns. So in the end you get 200 channels with 50% commercials and 50% crappy reruns, instead of 5 or 10 better quality channels.
Unless of course you pay extra for some channels, but most people don't want to do that.
Actually, your standard Real Life view is a lot wider than it's high, so 16:9 is _better_ for digesting information than 4:3.
The only movies that truely look wrong on 4:3 are the really, really old ones that weren't planning on the television format. As a result, part of the key action is cut off or they have to digitally zoom the image and pan around.
You're way off here. Just as an example, when Casablanca and Gone with the wind were filmed the standard aspect ratio in the _cinemas_ was 4:3. Cinemascope etc were partly created so that movietheaters would be able to compete with the home television.
Today, filmmakers make extensive use of aspect ratios close to 2:1 (1.86:1, 2.35:1 etc) and the only way to experience these movies to their full extent is (at the moment) to get the movies on DVD and view them on a widescreen television ...
Before you continue .. have you actually _tried out_ 16:9? Watched a standard 4:3 movie and then the 16:9 version? Or even larger aspect ratios?
it's in my head