Cable has stayed virtually the same on a technical level; my local cable company simply OFFERS digital, and some channels require it, but for the local channels you can either upgrade to HD or just keep a regular package and they’ll actually revert the signal back to analog for you.

Which, to me, seems like should be the option that costs since it seems like that more trouble than just piping the full HD through, but maybe not. The standalone HD box I have from when I lived in a more urban area actually does this locally when routed through a basic coax. cable, so why they convert it before piping it I find confusing.

But anyway, the HD signal is lighter and of higher quality, which does come with the catch that it doesn’t travel as far as leaving some people in the lurch. But in the long haul, it will actually be cheaper to transmit; we’re just going through the growing pains right now of adjusting to the new system (though, I honestly DO think they made the switch too soon).

I’m in a said “rural area” and could only ever get one channel via bunny ears prior to the switch anyway (and still oddly can actually get the new HD version of that same channel, though, I’m never home when anything good is on, so I yanked the thing out altogether to make room for game consoles). The U.S. government even gave out vouchers for people to upgrade their equipment.

As for the rest, I pretty much agree. I had cable for a short period of time and discovered that for every three shows I liked there were 10,000 piles of crap. And when I DVR’d the shows I actually wanted to watch, the beginnings or ends were chopped off (I remember this fancy piece of tech called a VCR where you could set the rec. time to 5 min. before and after; wonder what happened to that).

Finally, it came to the point (translation: my trial discount was over) where it cost less to just buy DVD’s of the shows I liked every so often. Sure, I don’t get the excitement of watching stuff as it airs, but so what.

Between DVD, Hulu (for now), Netflix, and, um, “other downloads”, I’ve given up on having cable and/or broadcast TV, but no on watching shows. And really, since I get to watch stuff on my timeline by my terms, I’m okay with that.

As for the marketing stuff, bottom line, TV execs have always been greedy bastards, there’s just more of them now that ever.

Although, I’m still miffed about what they did to Firefly.