Agreed. Though considering Japan has the geographic size of one large state in the US and a population of only 127.3 million compared to 306 million in the U.S. -- it is no wonder the U.S. broadband physical infrastructure is behind in comparison.
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Apple Announces Release of HD Movie Sales and Rentals via iTunes
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Agreed. Though considering Japan has the geographic size of one large state in the US and a population of only 127.3 million compared to 306 million in the U.S. -- it is no wonder the U.S. broadband physical infrastructure is behind in comparison.
720P should not be called HD
definitely 720
Anyway, although 720 is higher-def than 480, it shouldn't get the title of "HD". This was just a marketing ploy to sell uninformed people a lower quality product until they could finally come out with true 1080P equipment.
It sickens me that Apple, who used to be known for high quality, would still be selling 720P content when 1080P has been available for so long.
I had to buy a tiny "apple tv"-like device from CHINA just to get 1080P upscaling and content to my TV. (HDX-1000 in case you were wondering)
I LOVE Apple's design in both product and interface, and would buy an Apple TV in a second if they'd only support 1080P.
definitely 720
Anyway, although 720 is higher-def than 480, it shouldn't get the title of "HD". This was just a marketing ploy to sell uninformed people a lower quality product until they could finally come out with true 1080P equipment.
It sickens me that Apple, who used to be known for high quality, would still be selling 720P content when 1080P has been available for so long.
I had to buy a tiny "apple tv"-like device from CHINA just to get 1080P upscaling and content to my TV. (HDX-1000 in case you were wondering)
I LOVE Apple's design in both product and interface, and would buy an Apple TV in a second if they'd only support 1080P.
Are you being a Japan fanboy? I talk to people in Japan everyday by videochat and while they see me crystal clearly, there video is constantly dropping out and extremely compressed. When I ask them to download something, they take 5 times as long as a download here. Maybe its good in center of Tokyo, but people just 10 minutes away have terrible up/down speeds.
I don't know why people think Japan is so high-tech... they excel at making mobile phones, toilet seats, and other gadgets, but not much of the real tech we're innovating each day in the U.S. They are quicker to market and more accepting of a new idea or item, though.
You're one of those people that believes anything less than 1080p isn't HD, aren't you.? So you probably bought into Sony's 'Full HD' bull, no doubt. Good luck with being a accomplice for the media companies.
As far as Japan goes, they do a lot more than phones and toilet seats and gadgets. They also make very good cars and control most of the international supertanker market. They're the second biggest economy in the world after the US.
And if they see you crystal-clear while you get drop-outs and compression, the problem isn't on their end.
You know how long it would take to download a 1080p movie?
No - I get the Blu-ray in the mail from Netflix.
What WOULD you call it then? Sorta-HD? The term HD was and IS designated for 720P and 1080i. Those were the two HD standards invented for the HD revolution. 1080P was and is not available in any broadcast format. 1080i is NOT higher real resolution than 720P. It's interlaced 540P which uses a trick of the brain to give "apparent" more resolution for static images. It is NOT higher real resolution and is vastly inferior to 720P for material with a lot of movement in it. By your standards, NOTHING on broadcast, cable or satellite TV could be called "HD". Just Blu-Ray. Why not propose calling 1080P "Super HD" or something instead of suggesting not calling the HD standards what they were from day 1?
That is certainly NOT the true history of HD.
Clearly, you know nothing about bandwidth limitations for downloading (the 720P downloads alone are more than many people's limits would allow). AppleTV for better or worse wasn't designed for this purpose in mind. They've adapted their investment in hardware for the market demand after the fact. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Either wait for Apple to update the hardware (if they ever do) or go buy a BD player. Whining about the product won't make it produce 1080P.
This whole 1080P snobbery trend is what truly sickens me (and most of it is from people that don't have sets at viewing distances that would show the difference anyway). If anything is a marketing ploy, it's pushing 1080P on set sizes where it makes little to no difference. And the price gap isn't a small one. For example, if you sit more than 5.75 feet from a 46" 1080P set, you will only 720P worth of resolution and the 720P set costs $400 less than the cheaper-end 1080P ones so the joke is on the consumer most of the time. Yes, if you have a truly large set and sit a medium distance away then 1080P is preferable, but that's a pretty small minority of people and that doesn't mean 720P looks like crap or something. I've got a 93" set at 8 feet and at that distance I COULD see 100% of the 1080P detail IF I had a 1080P projector, but at the time I bought my 720P projector, the 1080P ones were $5000+ and that was a bit out of my price range. Even today almost all of them are over $2000 to start (screen not included). Even so, 720P looks pretty darn amazing compared to what a $25,000 NTSC projector produced in the mid 1990's. Half the people out there with HD capable sets don't even have proper HD signals yet (either the wrong cable box or a very limited number of "sorta HD" channels. I get over 50 channels of HD from my cable company, but I have a high quality 3rd party source. My mother who lives in another part of the state gets about 24 HD channels from Time Warner at a higher cost than I get 50.
Frankly, a 720P cheaper alternative to Blu-Ray isn't a bad thing, IMO right now. If you're going to compete with 1080P, Blu-Ray has the advantage of low-compression. No internet based download is going to easily compete with that at 1080P. But at 720P, it's feasible. I can get a signal about a minute after ordering a 720P iTunes rental. If you had a BD signal at those compression levels, it'd take a good day to download the entire movie over a 5MBit connection. That's not a viable business model, IMO and many ISPs would undoubtedly start capping what you could download each month if they haven't already. In short, not everyone NEEDS 1080P Blu-Ray. My only complaint about Apple selling 720P is that they should drop the price to $10 or $12 for older movies and $15 for new ones to really offer a nice alternative to Blu-Ray given the lower resolution.
Yes, I would prefer if my AppleTV supported 1080P for future reference and higher picture displays if/when I get a 1080P projector some day, but if 720P "sickens" you, then how did you EVER stand to watch NTSC all your life before HD? Or was that before your time on Earth?
hehe. Hardly. My post was in defense of the United States. If anything I'm a U.S.A fanboy and proud of it.
If what you say is true about bandwidth limitations in Japan then I'd say that's very sad for them... I wasn't aware.
One other thing I'd like to mention - that is not so biased by country -- the internet as most know it is a very young technology (15 years perhaps?). How long did it take television broadcast and cable to reach high definition standards? It sure wasn't 15 years. No my friends, digital delivery over IP is here to stay and will reign supreme sooner than many think.