During the recent holiday break, I took part in that great American pastime of lounging around watching the variety of college football bowl games. Having recently moved into the HDTV arena myself, I was anxious to see the action in all it’s 1080i glory.

I traveled to a friend’s house to watch one of the big games on ABC. On a side note, ABC currently broadcasts in 720p and not 1080i (like NBC, CBS and many other networks), but on most ‘normal’ size HDTVs the difference is not really noticeable. Anyway, as the big game came on a few people started asking ‘Is this HD? Do you have the HD feed on?’

Although the image was obviously better than standard definition (SD) television, and in the widescreen format, it didn’t really look that clear. It wasn’t the television, in fact the TV was a new beautiful Sony Bravia and we had just seen it in action with a Blue-ray disc before the game. No, it was Comcast and an obviously ambitious attempt to broadcast ‘HDTV’ using the absolute minimum amount of bandwidth possible.

Back in the old days with analog TV, the signal you got was essentially always the same regardless of who you were getting your signal from and regardless of if it was over a cable wire or antenna. The digital revolution has changed all that. Now, many homes have a single ‘data’ connection to the outside world which carries phone, video and the Internet all over the same wire. In fact, so far as the data network is concerned these things are all basically one in the same… just different streams of data all flowing over the same connection, which eventually gets split up inside your home by various end devices (cable box, cable modem and VOIP connection).

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