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News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.
cactus picture HDTV Sets, The Ultimate Network Computer
By Barry Frankel, bfrankel@ix.netcom.com.

Yesterday, the FCC gave away $70 billion dollars in bandwidth to the TV broadcasters for HDTV. Wow, in only 18 months, I can watch a high definition Roseann and hear Larry King on TV in pure digital sound. What planet are these folks living on?

Today, there is only one cable system in the country that can support HDTV and Ií m not in this service area, and the satellite TV vendors are not planning to support it. So I and all the other 70 million homes with cable will have to go out and buy a roof top antenna, if we want HDTV. Right. This sound like the product from hell.

I thought about all of this for a bit and then it came to me. HDTVs will make wonderful Network Computers. The HDTVs they showed on the TV news have a large screen area, high resolution graphics, a power supply and probably enough CPU power to run Java. Just add a telephone jack and use some of the existing processing power for a software modem and some more CPU for NC functions, and presto, the ultimate Network Computer. And since HDTV programs wo'nt be broadcast all the time, they could send out Internet Push Programing the rest of the time.

This might just work.

Barry

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