Craig Birkmaier wrote: > Did you really look at all of the TVs at your Best Buy? > > Yes, the LCD panels are there and displayed in a more > prominent location, however, the 4;3 CRT based sets in my > store still take up a complete aisle. What is more > interesting about most of these CRT bases sets is that > many of these models include DVD players, and in a few > cases VHS tape transports as well. There are some of those, even at Target, but it looks to me like they are definitely on their way out. But the point I was actually trying to make is that until very recently, all LCD sets of 20" or less were 4:3 (excpet a few 17" ones) and were SDTV. That category seems to be finished. Now these small LCDs are 16:9 and HDTV, and have the integrated ATSC receiver. And they cost no more than those recent SDTV sets. You seem to have to go down to 15" size LCDs to see 4:3 anymore, at least at Best Buy. I think this is a new trend. > As for what people will use sets for integrated > receivers for... > > The research suggests that most consumers are NOT using > the DTV tuners... But the research had no way of accounting for the newest small sets. My thinking is that a fair percentage of them will become secondary sets in households, so they could get a "higher than 15 percent" representation in the OTA category. Of course, as I suggested years ago, the receivers in these sets have to work very well for this to become true. It's probably more important for these small sets to have good receivers than it is for the big ones. > Perhaps this will change if the industry actually > starts to promote OTA reception. That is, before they > move all of their most valuable content to the internet > and pay per view. The Lovelace piece Mark Aitken posted indicates otherwise, in the UK at least. I truly wonder whether there are as stark differences as you seem to think between these markets. Even if we have many here that will pay for the umbillical hookup, I wonder whether they are also willing to pay per view on a regular basis. My bet is no. My bet is that these PPV predictions are no more likely to be true than the ads showing teenagers lying around in city traffic to watch their TV shows on their cell phones. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.