By now, many of you have read the George Ou article outlining the different variations of High Definition content delivery and how many of them are calling themselves High Definition (HD) when they aren’t even close to that. If you haven’t read the article, I encourage you to do so, I’ve posted a link at the bottom of the page to his blog.

In a nutshell, the “HD” options on Vudu, AppleTV, Xbox 360 and many cable and satellite providers are nowhere near the same picture quality as “true” HD content available on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.

This posits two questions: First, why are they permitted to call their content HD when it’s not truly HD? This dilutes the brand-name if you will, and it makes people lump poor quality in the same category with outstanding quality. If you listen to the “HT Guys” podcast, and I suggest you do if you are interested in home audio and video, then you may have heard them call for a different moniker such as “near-HD” or “DVD-plus” as opposed to HD. This is an excellent idea and should be called for by everyone who knows the difference. Personally, I don’t have a problem paying a premium for true HD content…but I do if I am paying for it but getting something less.

Second, with all of the recent talk about ISP’s throttling band width, how will the proliferation of these set-top delivery boxes further exacerbate an already unhealthy situation? Even with unacceptable levels of compression, the amount of data that must be pushed thru the pipeline for a single movie is large when compared with web surfing. If you wanted to deliver a real HD experience, under current bandwidth limitations, it would take all but a select few of us literally a day to download a single movie. Yikes.

The solution to all of this has yet to present itself. Currently, the work around is what we are experiencing – highly compressed poor quality delivery. What we absolutely do NOT want to do is become complacent and accept this pale imitation as true HD, much like we do now for .mp3’s. I don’t know about anyone else, but when I listen to iTunes purchased music piped through my home stereo or even car stereo, it sounds average, at best. Some might even say “flat”, too much midrange and that’s about it. I can certainly hear it when I play a lossless format followed by an .mp3, and I’m no audiophile. We’ve traded the convenience of having the music be portable for the audio quality. That’s fine for schlepping around in my iPod, but not on my stereo. Same for video codecs – if I’m watching it on my iPhone, I’m willing to accept more compression and less quality because portability is the primary issue. It’s not useful to me if I can’t fit it on my device. A set-top box, however, is usually equipped with a hard drive and a processor, all hooked up to a HD capable video display. Therefore, I should, and do, expect excellent HD quality when that’s what I buy.

So, from now on – tell everyone that you know that this is NOT true HD but what amounts to a first generation attempt at delivering as good a quality experience as possible under current limitations. But not HD.

R

George Ou’s blogpost: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=959

HTGuys: www.htguys.com