Best Buy hired a firm to take a survey of the state of the American public’s knowledge of HDTV, and sad results are in. You don’t know what the hell is going on with your television.
Half of HDTV owners who responded to Best Buy’s survey “admit they are either not watching HD programming, or they aren’t sure if they are. Of these respondents, 35% didn’t realize they needed to subscribe to HD programming to watch HDTV.” Ok, this is sad. Just… sad.
The survey also suggested that ignorance about how to set up the HDTV was a source of embarrassment:
While 41% of HDTV owners admit to knowing little to nothing at all about HD, they would not want to admit that to friends and family; Half (52%) of HDTV owners agree it would be difficult to admit their HDTV wasn’t set up right after showing off to friends and family.
The unsurprising news is that this survey is essentially a sales pitch for Best Buy’s overpriced cables and installation packages—both of which you can skip, along with the extended warranty… if you know what you’re doing.
Obviously, many people don’t, so do us a favor. Tell a friend everything you know about HDTV.
Best Buy HD Done Right Survey Results (PDF) (Press Release)
(Photo:epicharmus)
More From Consumerist
-
Best Buy Changing Its Return Policy From 30 Days To 15 Days
-
Best Buy CEO-For-Now Promises Change, End To Showrooming
-
Best Buy To Cut 400 Jobs, But No Store Closures Right Now
-
Best Buy & Future Shop Suddenly Shut Down A Bunch Of Canadian Stores Today
-
At Best Buy You Can Pay $3 More For Someone Else To Open A Product For You
Or just get a job at BBY and get the cables/installation at cost.
My parents love their 27″, just know it looks much better than their other tv, and they know that channels 700-750 are in HD, “sometimes” My dad hates it when programming isn’t zoomed out to fill the screen though. I wish cable could make a box that automatically fills the screen no matter what’s broadcast.
@BABAKI: What’ happened to #4?
@LTS!:
Whether or not a station has subchannels does not necessarily directly correlate into picture quality. If the station employs modern variable bitrate encoding, then the aggregate bandwidth is actively managed and the most given to the channel that requires it at that instant. Even smarter techniques can change the dynamics of the encoding to avoid sending any bandwidth intensive I-frames on subchannels when the bandwidth demands are the highest. And it doesn’t matter if it’s OTA or not, the cable and satellite systems take it 19.39 if they don’t grab it off the air.
Furthermore, 8VSB has superior performance in dealing with impulse/atmospheric noise. 8VSB uses Reed-Solomon encoding to repair damaged packets and convolutional encoding that interleaves data that keeps noise from destroying the data. What 8VSB sucks at is dealing with multipath, which makes it a horrible distribution method for mobile users. TV stations have engineered ways to cut back on one of the polarizations of the signal for HD and insert other modulation schemes that work better with multipath, like COFDM, for mobile users.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. How is it any different than the automobile industry? How many SUV owners actually use their behemoths for hauling boats and trampling underbrush in the forest? I imagine 99% of the time, it’s to take that single driver to and from work on pavement.
One does not need cable or satellite to watch HD. With an indoor or outdoor antenna, depending on your locality, in the HD tuner, you will be able to watch any over the air HD programming that is available on the station you are watching. Also with HD TV’s using the HD (digital) tuner, there are second and sometimes third stations being broadcast under the channel designation. For example channel “3″ will have their digital/high definition broadcast on channel “3.1″ and standard def (SD) “simulcast” on “3.2″ or it might be a 24 hour weather channels on “3.2″.
In my area the Fox affiliate has their broadcast on the “.1″ and the 24 hour music video channel “The Tube” on their “.2″ channel.
Also the PBS station has 3 digital channels going.
There is a lot of TV available with digital TV. You may not need cable.
HDTV for Dummies isn’t out yet, I guess.
Just reading the comments I’d have to say the study bears out. Conflicting posts, confusing information. I personally have never been an early adopter and I know NOTHING about HD TV, I get confused about the difference between HD and digital, and yeah it seems like there is a lot of conflicting information out there.
Hey consumerist! for those of us who aren’t techno geeks, I’d love to see an article that just gives the basic rundown on HDTV, how to purchase it, what to avoid, etc.
I’m part of the Financial Management Association here at the University of Tennessee and we just had a speaker come to the FMA meeting. His name was Charles Anderson and his family started Anderson Holdings(they run the online mp3 download site for walmart and own books-a-million and a bunch of other entities including the Firework brand ACME). Well he said that they just signed a deal with walmart to put a seperate employee of Anderson Holdings in every walmart that will help in the electronics department explaining to people how it all works. They’ve also signed a deal with all the large cable companies to be able to automatically upgrade the cable of the person purchasing the HDTV to a digital cable service. They will also be offering services to bring all the equipment out to your house and install it. This marks the first time walmart has allowed a third party into there stores. At least from what I remember it is.
This survey is what is known in poltics as a “push poll”. While appearing to merely get statistics on public knowledge or ignorance on HDTV, Best Buy is pushing them on further Best Buy products and services.
“Of these respondents, 35% didn’t realize they needed to subscribe to HD programming to watch HDTV.”
I didn’t realize I needed to subscribe to HD programming to watch HDTV either. I guess that is why I watch HDTV using a free service. Maybe you haven’t yet heard of this service. It is called over-the-air from my local TV stations. I did have to buy a TV antenna for a one-time fee, though. But the setup of plugging the antenna cable into my HDTV wasn’t hard at all, so I didn’t need Best Buy to do that.
@jaredgood1: Not with sports they are not indistinguishable when it comes to fast movements. But then tube TV’s have been the superior picture for this and in general until recently with the newer HDTVs.
@Alvis: Yes, typically PBS does and Channel 9, WUSA in DC does.
@mconfoy: Thanks; I used to live in Baltimore and had set up this antenna ( [www.hdtvprimer.com] ) that got me a good deal of the DC stations as well. I just defaulted to the Baltimore offerings, but now you make me wish I had checked out the DC ones as well.
@Alvis: I realize this, but I was trying to play devil’s advocate and it didn’t really come off properly. People are going to want new technology that has a significant impact on quality (be it the quality of the media or the experience itself) and/or ease of use. This has always been the case. To suggest otherwise, as KevinQ did, is naïve in my opinion.