we have more phones also .....

not sure what that proves ..

Well, the ATSC system is a standard in the U.S.

A standard by committee certainly, with 17 different formats.

Still, in practice it's 1080i and 720p, and contrary to what many geeks think, it is not necessary to have a pixel-for-pixel match on your display (there are other factors that are far more important).

At normal viewing distances, the eye cannot see the difference, not in my direct experience, and not in the careful findings of one of the true industry gurus whose name escapes me right now. His findings were backed up with solid physiology science.

I think the Canadian numbers show something that is found in many many areas. The U.S. is ahead in early adopters in most fields, but widespread implementation is well behind other countries who start later but catch up faster.

Look at broadband internet, cell phones, 3G, chat, ring tones, digital video, widescreen TV, DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast radio), 5.1 radio, traffic information in cars, larger than 19" TVs, etc. etc....

There is a particular kind of conservatism here in the U.S. that says "good enough so why change?" (this has nothing to do with political conservatism, especially nothing to do with the wise founder of conservatism, Edmund Burke, who would be quick to challenge a certain local despot to a duel over his use of the term "conservative").

HDTV is not for the faint of heart today (or for those who don't have a technical person at home). At least SMPTE announced this week that they are starting to investigate the technical reasons why there often is no lipsync. That will be nice, and hopefully in the end
we won't have to install delay lines in all AV receivers with a knob to match the audio to the video on a program-by-program basis (today only the more expensive receivers have this feature, albeit as an option on page 56 of the remote setup menu).

I'm hoping that as a side project, they will work on getting stations to set the widescreen flag correctly, and after that to agree on a specific number of lines to show vertically (1080 or 1086). The latter problem sucks when you have to mask off the top to avoid going crazy from the data being transmitted there.

Soon (weeks or months) we'll also have generation 5 of the ATSC chips in the tuners. This is an important step for many, as it makes it possible to see many more digital TV stations over the air with no other changes.

Watch out for impostors though, the latest LG tuner claimed 5G chips, but was found to have 4G when taken apart...

I have no plans to update my home to HDTV until 2008 so until then I'll watch my Dish Network and wish. In my area, clients with HDTV's are extreemly few and one I did job for one of them accepted the DVD in anamorphic wide screen and just loves it. So for now SD DVD's for me.

I remember when traveling through Italy in the summer of 2001, we Americans marvelled at the number of cellphones in use. EVERYONE had a cellphone. The guide explained to us that the bureaucracy that controlled the telephones made it difficult and expensive to get a regular landline phone and the process took forever. By contrast, you could be online with a cellphone very quickly. I'm not sure there's any relevance to the fact that some other countries are faster to adopt HDTV than Americans.

Our own family still has a 40" Mitsubishi rear-projection NTSC set (CRT based). I keep waiting for the darn thing to die so we can better justify getting a new display, but the set just keeps running. I do notice some of that green-flare effect on certain edges of objects, which I understand means the green CRT is getting tired. Still, a very nice picture, and I'm fond of the nice wood cabinet housing (complete with hinged real wood doors!).

In any event, I think most people use HDTV sets in the U.S. to watch DVDs, not receive broadcast or cable programming. That would be our primary objective, too.

if you ever tried to use a payphone (tokenphone) in italy - you would know why they use cell phones ..

He-he! Payphones are fast disappearing everywhere. In India you see Sadhus (holy men) nowadays who own only a loin cloth and a cell phone. At least they have their priorities right :O).

It should be mentioned that Europe is far behind the U.S. in HDTV.

As soon as they decide on 720p vs. 1080i (they're picking one), adoption is likely to be rapid though.

16:9 widescreen TVs (standard definition) became popular there a long time ago, and now they're going with MPEG-4 for HD instead of MPEG-2, which gives them a choice of three times as many channels or three times the qualityor a mix thereof. (MPEG-4 is 3x more efficient for HD, but only 2x more efficient for SD per broadcast engineers.)

Here, if it wasn't for DirecTV deploying MPEG-4 bigtime this year to avoid having to buy more transponders, we wouldn't see that in a long time. That business went to Tandberg in Norway.