MY PARENTS:: HD TV USABILITY

My parents love new gadgets – anything “hi-tech”, shiny and expensive.  When they brought home their first  SONY BRAVIA HD TV, they were so excited to see those 4:3 channels stretched out to 16:9 – they actually like to see the image stretched out because it is bigger and as we all know, bigger is better!!

When I convinced them that they weren’t actually watching HD because they had an old cable box, they insisted that Time Warner Cable install the newer digital set-top box so they could experience the luxury of true HD…

Alas, TWC installed the new boxes and NBC on channel 2 looked the same; It was not easy trying to explain to them that NBC was in fact available in HD but that they would need to turn to an HD channel.

When my parents accepted the fact that there could possibly be channels that are not HD versus channels that are, they were completely confused when they turned to channel 704 (700’s are HD in NYC on TWC) – and the program that was airing at the moment was not shot in HD and displayed 4:3 on their shiny, big tv.

My Dad interrogated the TWC technician as to why TWC was sending crap to his bran new, shiny HD tv.  Although I had already explained that it was within the control of the Network, NBC in this case, not TWC – the technician patiently tried to reinforce this argument.

On one level it can be very frustrating for new generation transition thinking to sink in on the legacy minds of analogue channel surfers; However, I come from a place where I don’t like to force new experiences onto people until the methodology has been refined and the real-world expectation set.

The Digital transition is one thing, but HD is not the standard yet and for the average user, my parents, they don’t really need to know why “sometimes” Channel 702 is full screen and other times it is 4:3 with black curtains, why some commercials are HD and others are not…

I think it is still too soon to sell the world on HD as the standard – it should be treated as the exception until the major networks replace all their legacy transmission components to HD and we don’t see anything on broadcast channels in SD.  You try to explain that to my parents, good luck!

Frankly, I am more excited about Netflix live services than the fancy HD programming – but that is just me 😉