This is a response to Cecil’s column on TV formats, which was fascinating. However, things have changed a little.
Here in Australia, home of the rapidly-adopted technological advance, we now have wide-screen TV. Well, some rich people do.
We certainly have broadcasts being made in DVD. I know very little, except that it involves digital imaging, and has capacity for future multichanneling and interactive TV broadcasts. And it comes onto your new, lovely, slender, flat WideScreen TV.
Smart product placement folk have ensured that the new wide TV is used on all the news programs, in Australia’s Funniest Home Videos, and throughout the Big Brother program (don’t we have unusual and different programs here in Oz!). Other programs have “available in wide-format” superimposed at the beginning, the way they used to say “in living colour” years ago.
My normal TV (7 years old) is looking distinctly dowdy. How long can I hang out…?
We have widescreen TV’s here too, and digital (MPEG-2) TV broadcasts in both 16:9 and 4:3 formats which you can select according to your TV’s proportions, and will automatically switch depending on the proportions of whatever is broadcast if the TV is connected via a SCART socket.
We have much the same – new sets available (at high prices), “Also in HDTV” “bugs” on programs, and a new set of digital broadcast channels, with a plan for the old VHF and UHF channels to be abandoned in ten years’ time.
Technology has already raised the bar, however. IBM has recently released a flat computer screen with 3840x2400 resolution at 80 pixels per cm. (It costs US$22,000. They didn’t plan to produce such a product for another six years, but the government really, really wanted a hundred of them, and by the very nature of the technology, it must be mass produced.)