And it’s a damn good thing.
The HD proposal that almost made it to production was a god-awful hybrid. The standards were being set by a committee that was insistent on preserving the legacy NTSC signal. They were going to keep the 4:3 525 line broadcast standard intact, and transmit the sidebars containing the cut-off parts of the 16:9 as digital data embedded in the blanking and flyback intervals! The receiver would have to glue the two ends onto the sides of the viewing area.
Nobody had the balls to tell the public that their old TVs would stop working.
In the end, the ability of a single broadcast channel having the capacity to carry half a dozen separate streams sensibly won out. The compromise was for the government to issue vouchers to everyone before they shut down the analog transmissions, good for one free digital tuner-to-analog converter box.
By the time analog was shutting down, most people had already replaced their TVs in anticipation of the better signals. Our company wasted far more money on incompetent contractors to upgrade our retail computer systems to accept the stupid coupons than we made by selling DTV converters.
It literally would have been cheaper if we’d just given away the converters, thrown away the vouchers, and ate the losses. The code was so buggy and problematic that near the end of the program, that’s exactly what we did.
