What hardware is required to receive HDTV broadcasts?
DIRECTV says they expect DSS decoders to be built into all HDTV sets available in the next few years since the additional cost to include DSS is about $50 per unit which is fairly insignificant. If true, only an HDTV set connected to a satellite dish will be required by DSS owners and their existing decoders wont be necessary. However, that would imply an additional conditional access card and account, so it will be interesting to see how DIRECTV implements their HDTV plans. Most DBS decoder models contain a very high speed data port which the manufacturers have been saying can be directly connected to a separately purchased unit capable of decoding the High Definition television broadcast stream. However, no company has announced plans to develop this separate decoding unit and most think it would be quite expensive and impractical to do so. Therefore, it is appears that existing decoders will never be used for reception of HDTV. Instead, new models and/or the television sets themselv
