The HDTV Catch: Wheres the Programming?
All this talk of high-definition TV, and wouldn’t you know it? The Duo are most emphatically not broadcast in HDTV. In fact, for a variety of technical reasons, they may even look worse to viewers who have already made the switch from standard TV. (They’re not kidding about being two analog people in a digital world, you know.) First, if you have an old-school standard set, you’ll always see the old-fashioned, standard-def analog signal–when a program says it is broadcast in high definition, that just means that it’s available in the format. High-def programming is always broadcast on a special channel that standard TVs simply don’t receive. And “digital” doesn’t necessarily mean high-definition, either–Steve notes glumly that most digital cable and satellite signals are just plain old TV, or worse. So what is out there? Most major local stations have a special high-definition channel that broadcasts many network shows in high-def–but with lots of exceptions, such as most reality sh
