Chris Forrester's Big Picture: 2008: the year of HD

It’s now clear that the trend towards flat-panel sets and HDTV is not a rush but a stampede.

We can confirm that nobody is buying cathode ray tube sets because – with very few exceptions – UK retailers are not stocking them. It’s much the same in North America, where the shift to flat-panels has been nothing short of dramatic. The US sales numbers are slightly skewed because many viewers there still have a love affair with rear-projection televisions.

However, mixed into this development is a further bias towards LCD displays. Their prices have fallen and there have been some unnecessary scare stories about plasma TVs’ expected lives.

In general, I suspect that while the high street will see fierce competition there will also be some price stabilisation in the market.

This is certainly the case in the US, where early January saw some price-cutting on older models – but the bulk of viewers are going for feature-rich displays. Savvy viewers are also selecting 1080p sets to protect them against further upgrades and also to help in viewing video games and packaged moves (from Blu-ray and HD-DVD), and leading to some heavy discounting of 720p and 1080i sets to clear out stock.

One major event next year might benefit UK set-buyers, and that’s November’s US presidential elections. The logic behind this is that next summer Olympic Games from China will see a huge number of flat-panel sets sold. In other words, the big spenders will already have made their buying decisions. The build-up to the election always sees a boost in TV sales numbers for some bizarre reason. But this year’s event is also just 12 weeks before the US switches off analogue transmissions (in February 2009).

Marketing thrust

This is expected to lead to a flood of low-cost digital sets with built-in tuners that are not feature-rich. Some commentators have suggested that these sets (probably in the 28in-32in sizes) will retail at just $300 (£150). If the market responds – and most think they will be snapped up for second rooms, kids’ bedrooms, and so on – then expect a similar marketing thrust in the UK, where by 2009 our own switch-off will be making serious advances. Manufacturers think there’s a major niche in this ‘bargain-basement’ sector.

BSkyB has led the HDTV charge from Day One in the UK. With more than a dozen channels on air, and many more expected to join the rush in 2008, cable (and IPTV services like Tiscali) have been left behind. This will inevitably change as Virgin Cable gets its act together.

Quite whether BSkyB will follow the example of DirecTV is a tougher prediction. DirecTV managed to find 100 hi-def channels to put on its system by Christmas. It is fair to say that many of them were either regional sports channels or were simply timeshifted VOD movie channels in HD.

But almost 70 are conventional channels from names that are well known to us. The list includes music from MTV and VH-1, kids’ shows from Cartoon and Nickelodeon, as well as family favourites like Discovery. Discovery Networks has had its Discovery HD Theatre on air in the US for some four years. In the US it also transmits Discovery Channel, TLC (The Learning Channel), Animal Planet and Discovery Science Channel in HD. And Discovery CEO David Zaslev is promising to add two more channels in HD during early 2008. Zaslev’s theory is that Discovery is buying prime real estate on the HDTV programming guide.

‘As more people get HD sets, Discovery will have seven of the 30 to 40 channels people will want to watch on their new equipment,’ he said. ‘We look great in HD.’

The HDTV genre that is currently ignored in Europe – and yet is perhaps second only to sports in the US – is news. One American commentator recently forecast that with more than 55 local stations now putting out their newscasts in HD, viewers were beginning to see much more on-air promotion of the benefits of switching from analogue (or standard-definition digital) to hi-def. The stations want viewers to switch so that they can start charging advertisers more for the ‘upscale’ eyeballs they are attracting via HDTV. Even ‘basic cable’ channels like CNN, Fox News and MSNBC are switching to all-HD, at least for their studio-based efforts.

Finally, producers are realising that viewers are not watching ‘standard-def’ programming, and the TV studios are producing more and more output in HD. This includes drama, of course, but also quiz shows, cookery and other day-time programming, as well as soap operas. They are all in HD, and the reason is simple; the 50million HD homes expected to have made the switch by this past December.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not reflect the attitudes or opinions of What Satellite & Digital TV or Future Publishing Limited.