October, 2006 | HD TV PROFESSOR

Month: October 2006

Reader Question: Indoor HDTV Antenna

October 31, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

Q: I'm interested in picking up over the air HDTV indoors. Do I need a special antenna or can I use rabbit ears ? Radio Shack sells some antennas that are listed as UHF, VHF, and HDTV but are more money then the rabbit ears. I have heard of picking people up HDTV with just rabbit ears. Any help is appreciated. A: Let me start with a quote from the...

War of the Worlds?

October 30, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

Peter Steiner drew a now-famous cartoon for The New Yorker that was published in 1993; a dog types at a computer and tells another dog that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." This has interesting implications for the rise in user-posted videos on sites such as YouTube, and it is appropriate that we consider this today, because of something that happened 69 years ago today. October 30, 1938...

Rich Folk Buy HDTVs

October 27, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

Last week, a story in USA Today cited a report from the Leichtman Research Group that revealed -- among other things -- that 63% of the U.S. households with one or more HDTV had an annual income of $75,000 or more. I don't find that at all surprising. The fact that 6% of households with an annual income under $30,000 have an HDTV is more surprising, though I suspect that...

One in Ten Watch TV on PCs

October 26, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

Where did you watch the latest episode of Lost ? If you were like one out of 10 of those surveyed by The Conference Board for their "Consumer Internet Barometer" service, you were probably seated at your PC instead of on a living room couch. The study found that 10% of the respondents watched some television broadcast online. Another interesting result was that this online viewing did not reduce their...

10 Million Chinese Can’t Be Wrong

October 25, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

How real is IPTV? As I've pointed out before, the definition of IPTV varies depending on who you talk to, but in general it means the distribution of video content over the Internet. YouTube is a limited type of IPTV, but there are services out there that look just like a typical cable TV broadcast or on-demand service. In this country, we're saddled with an enormous (and well entrenched) infrastructure...

Another Pocket Projector

October 24, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

Last week, Toshiba announced their TDP-FF1AU projector. (Where do these companies get their model names? Imagine if Detroit were to name their cars this way!) It has 800 by 600 pixel resolution (SVGA) so it can display EDTV images without a problem, making it suitable for DVDs. It uses a DLP imager, and it has a $699 estimated price. So far, that's pretty familiar. But it runs on rechargeable batteries...

Make it Up in Volume?

October 23, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

A report in today's DigiTimes Display News cites industry sources that claim LG.Philips LCD is cutting its price for the 42" LCD TV panel to $10 less than rival Samsung's 40" panel. According to the report, this places the price about $200 below the company's production costs. While this can be seen as good news for consumers, it's not great for LG.Philips, which has already been awash in red ink....

Mobile Video Viewing Habits

October 20, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

Okay, so maybe it's pushing it to talk about "habits" in something as new as mobile TV in the U.S., but Telephia provides detailed research on mobile TV viewership, and they've discovered some interesting results. The one I find most fascinating shows when people are most likely to be watching TV on their cell phones or PDAs. The most popular segment is 4 PM to 8 PM (31%), with the...

HDTVs Are Dependable, says Consumer’s Union

October 18, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

People are understandably hesitant to spend a lot of money on unfamilar technology. Buyers should find some comfort in a statement contained in the November issue of Consumer Reports: With more consumers buying flat-panel TVs, there's a growing amount of data on reliability, and the news is good. During the first year or two of use, LCD and plasma TVs have been just as reliable overall as picture-tube TVs, which...

Look Up in the HDTV Sky!

October 17, 2006 | Ibex Marketing

It's a bird? It's a plane? No, its DIRECTV 9S, the latest satellite in the DirecTV constellation, one of four launched in the last two years. It supports both standard resolution and HDTV programming, as well as interactive services. The company plans to launch two more birds in the coming year, which will more than quadruple their HD transmission capacity. The satellite rode into space last Friday on an Ariane...

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