OTA is fine if you have line of sight to the antennae. But if you happen to live in a valley, or have something blocking the signal, reception sucks. Even though I live near L.A., reception is still bad enough that I'm at the mercy of the cable and satellite guys. Then there are the 120 channels. What would my thumb do if I only had 10 or 12 channels to choose from?
Once you get past the obvious stuff in the article it’s worth asking questions about what this has to do with AMD. Some food for thought:
"Of course, the next-generation standards battle, involving various versions of MPEG-4 (and other flavors of the H.264 format) may prolong the HDTV transition process – especially as HD comes into home set-top boxes and/or media centers"
Me..
Are cable/satellite boxes going to be the best way to handle a constantly changing codex? In the last few years we've gone from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, and now H.264. This isn't going to be the last standard either. What happens when fiber to the curb becomes standard? Maybe a general-purpose processor that can handle any codex is going to be a better solution than getting a new black box every few years? And what happens if you have more than one HDTV? How many black boxes do you have to own?
Why not have the cable go into a PC capable of handling as many codex as you have viewing screens and then route the signals wirelessly to each viewer in the house. You could even set up TIVO kinds of things for each of the codex if the PC was set up with enough channels and storage (disk space/R&W DVD's).
Depending on how things evolve(Google model of storage on their Internet farms and dumb viewers connected through the Internet, or MSFT model of PC's in the home with lots of disk space/DVD R/W, lots of spindles, etc.) the PC business could be very different from today.
