Nothing beats being there, but Amanda and I are sitting here enjoying NBC’s HDTV presentation of the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, China and it’s absolutely breathtaking – the sheer magnitude of it all and the meshing of the latest technologies with massive amounts of human power and synchronization.

We can’t remember any opening ceremony of this size nor beauty. The bright vivid colors are amazing in high definition, but I can only imagine what it looks like in person. It’s crazy the amount of planning, practice and polish that went into this ceremony.

We’re looking forward to this set of summer games – lots of HD sports to watch over the coming weeks in the Keefer household.

Kind of like reliving history, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are competing for the same customers, with the same goals – to watch movies in high definition, much like the early 80’s war between Beta and VHS. Granted, that format war was for a much lower resolution and a completely analog format, but other than that, it’s pretty similar. Once again, in the end, it’s all about companies trying to make a buck, and the only one who loses out during the war is the consumer.

Just prior to CES, Warner Brothers, who had been the only big studio producing movies in both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, pledged their allegiance to the Blu-Ray camp, meaning a big loss for the HD-DVD camp. Apple recently has been rumored to start supporting the Blu-ray disc format as well. I just read too that Paramount may be ready to jump ship as well, leaving only Universal on the HD-DVD format.

Awhile back, I was really considering getting the HD-DVD addon for the Xbox 360, especially after a price drop. But after reading a couple reviews, the Xbox 360 allegedly sucks for playback of DVDs, standard and high def. It seems to do fine streaming MP4 movies from my Mac, but from everything I read, no so much on the actual disc playback. As loud as the 360 is, it’s not the optimal home theater piece anyway.

Regardless, I’m glad I didn’t jump on the HD deal, and it’ll probably still be awhile till we jump on the Blu-Ray. The longer we wait, the cheaper the prices will be and the more features the players will have. But, it’s really feeling like HD DVD is going to be the loser in this current format war, especially if it really does end up being only Universal supporting HD DVD.

So we recently switch from DirecTV over to Time Warner cable and went the cable card route, utilizing a single multicard in our new HD TiVo to record all our favorite shows. I was disappointed two, no three times recently by Time Warner’s lack of support for cable cards. Firstly, it took three separate installation appointments to get my cable cards working with the HD TiVo. The subcontractors aren’t trained for installation, and our local Time Warner Cable franchise has like two employees that know anywhere near the inner workings of cable cards and their setup and functionality.

Then, our newest bill from Time Warner announced that three new high definition channels were being added to the lineup. A few days after their addition, I realized they had not shown up in our lineup. Guess why? They weren’t available to cable card subscribers. Then, last week we received a note saying three high definition channels were going away for cable card subscribers. So anyway, below is the note I just emailed to Time Warner. I will follow it up with actual letters as well to the local franchise, and probably to someone higher up.

To Whom it May Concern:

I recently received your communique regarding cable card customers losing three of their high definition channels (ESPN2HD, MHD and UniversalHD). Not only are we losing the ability to tune into these three channels with our high definition package, we also did not receive the recent additions of TBSHD, Golf/VS HD and A&EHD.

I have only recently become a cable card customer, but am already appalled and disappointed that Time Warner Cable treats cable card customers as second-rate customers. It took a total of three installation visits for the cards to get installed, and now we are losing a minimum of six channels.

The cable card standard was created to make an equal footing for customer and cable-related manufacturers to utilize a variety of hardware, but Time Warner is edging toward anti-competitive practices with their discriminatory channel lineup offered to cable card customers. It seems cable card users are punished because Time Warner knows with the current state of the technology, cable card customers will not be using the over-priced features such as pay-per-view and on-demand programming.

Actions such as these make me question why I ever left satellite. They at least offered every channel to every customer.

Sincerely,
Ryan W. Keefer

Cool deal. It’s great to see DirecTV starting to make good on their promise of more HD content, though their 100 channel promise is a bit of a marketing inflation (they include their Sunday Ticket package channels, etc.). Even though we’re left DirecTV and are back to cable and a TiVo HD, this is great news. This should force Time Warner and other cable companies to scramble to add HD content to their lineup. It’d be great to get some of these channels, like VS. (think Tour de France in HD!), Animal Planet, etc. Then again, don’t add them too quickly. My TiVo HD only has 20 hours of recording capacity for HD content

21 New DirecTV HD Channels Go Live, More To Come

Looks like a great lineup in theory. We’ll see how long it takes to actually get all of these networks online. Unless TiVo comes back to DirecTV, we’re still switching at the end of our contract back over to Time Warner cable:

DirecTV - The March to 100 National High Definition Channels

When I first saw this headline, I wondered if our plan to switch back to cable later this year may be a bad idea, but doesn’t look like it will be an issue if this “Switched Digital Video.” In all honesty, I’ve always wondered if it made sense for cable/sat, etc. to always broacast a user all of the channels. Makes sense that with increased choices, this would go away. I’m wondering though how this will effect lag for the channel surfer. Those of us tied to our DVRs probably wouldn’t notice anything, but the channel surfer may:

Cable Seeks More Capacity For HDTV

This is a good idea, but it’s lacking one big thing in my humble opinion. It doesn’t talk about 480p, 720i, 1080i and 1080p. There’s a lot of mislabeling and misunderstanding on that topic, and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any regulation or education on that:

Digg This Bill Introduced To Insure Education of Consumers

Tired of waiting for the Series 3 HD TiVo. Here’s a step-by-step for making a PC into a DVR:

EFF’s HDTV-PVR Cookbook

HD resolution video files are huge. I could see how this could be a concern for the current infrastructure of the Internet. Even with compression and what not, an hour-long show like “Grey’s Anatomy” in HD format is 350MB.

BitTorrent is HDTV over Internet friends. All the “legitimate” networks need to embrace BT as much as people in tech have embraced the peer-to-peer sharing technology.

High-Definition Video Could Choke Internet

Wow, I guess this is going to be marketed to the high-end HD videophiles. It’s rack mountable, making me initially think it’d be for sports bars and the like, but sports bars don’t need time shifting at all. They’re all about live sporting events. I wonder though if a similar unit will show up that’s just a HD MPEG-4 receiver that is also rack mountable.

Also, if this big guy is expected to sell at $1500 - $2000. How much is the replacement for the HD DirecTiVo going to run? I’ll stick with my HD DirecTiVo as long as freaking possible, that’s for sure:

DirecTV Goes Pro with New HD DVR