I saw a HiVision (as it was called) demonstration set in Japan around 1990. It really was a striking improvement over every TV image that came before. You couldn’t help but be impressed.
The USA had been dragging its feet on HDTV implementation and standard-setting, but that worked to our advantage: by the time this country did get serious about it, chips to decode MPEG-2 were cheap enough to include in consumer TVs.
