HD Future costs...

[Chinatown]

As I understand, within a year or so, analog will be a thing of the past. Having said that, does anyone know what sort of fees we can expect from Cable/Satelite for full HD programing?

[GBK]

Analog looks like it will be history by 2009..  if you watch over the air you pay nothing and HD is only a subset of the programming the switch is to digital it doesn't have to be HD. Networks are going to provide increasing HD programming because it's a marketing tool for the conversion to Digital and frankly looks much better..

As to the fees there is already fees associated with HD for major services.. Direct TV is $11 more for HD package over the normal feed which by the way is already digital.  Cable has some sort of HD package as well but I'm not sure about the actual pricing.

[Bebop]

We are not going to see full HD programming for awhile. Even with the end of analog transmission we are still going to have ton of 4:3 materials to watch. So, the price for cable and Sat will not be that much different from today.

[jkane]

Think about what "analog" and "HD" really mean!  It's not that having Digital TV means you can not have Standard Definition (SD) television.  Analog and SD are not the same thing.  There is no reason why there can't be DT (Digital TV) and send more than one SD signal per carrier.  When that gets to cable, they could do what they do now.  Send a "digital" signal that is decoded into a SD picture.

Although you can't have HD with analog (that I know of), you CAN have more than one SD with digital.  So the concern for HD is not really an issue.

Digital TV is a win-win for everyone.  Any provider who is complaining just isn't seeing the upside of sending it's viewers more than one SD show at once.  They could run a whole channel of just advertisers if they wanted!  They could broadcast 2 or 3 SD shows to completely different marketing audiences at once.  This is boon for them, not a loss.

[tazman]

Although you can't have HD with analog (that I know of), you CAN have more than one SD with digital. So the concern for HD is not really an issue.

Just to add a little more info to your post.  Japan and a few others are HD on analog.  Here in the US we opted to go digital to replace analog as the new standard before offering HD.  What they cannot do as you mentioned is the multicasting of more than one audio and video feed on one carrier.