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Originally Posted by nialli
Seeing how few channels broadcast in widescreen and how slow the likes of Discovery and UKTV have been to recognise that most of us are watching their programming with massive black frames on widescreen stuff, I can't see HDTV being adopted any time soon for the vast majority of broadcasting.
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The problem for broadcasters like Discovery and UKTV is that they rely very heavily on old repeats that were shot in 4:3. Presumably they don't consider it worth their while to switch. Even $ky only got round to it this year, and bizarrely they still switch back to 4:3 to transmit adverts, even though virtually all the ads then have to be shown as a 14:9 compromise, causing black borders round all four sides of the image on my widescreen telly.
They will have the same problem when the UK goes HD (which will happen eventually, just not any time soon) - if they don't have programmes they can broadcast in HD, they're not going to bother switching. As with digital, it will be the BBC that leads the way. Where they go, the rest will follow, so anyone interested in this should keep an eye on the engineering pages of their website.