The Sets are HD-Ready... But the Salespeople Aren't

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To celebrate the recent arrival of "<u>HD-Ready</u>"-labeled TVs to UK store shelves, this morning I walked across the street to our local electronics store (a Dixons) and did a little light shopping. The first thing I saw upon walking in the door was a £8000 LG HD-ready flat-screen. It was big, and it was beautiful, and it carried the HD-ready label, as well as an information card that explained what HD meant.</p>



Crucially, however, that info card left out any mention of what content is (or isn't) available in HD. (Right now, there's literally one single content source that UK consumers can turn to for HD programming -- <u>HD1</u> -- and that's a satellite channel not carried by Sky that broadcasts just four hours of original content each day and requires the purchase of its own set-top box.) So I asked the nearest salesperson. He explained that HD "makes the pictures look better" (a good enough answer), and told me to look for sets labeled as HD-ready (right answer again). But when I asked what channels I could watch in HD, the answer was frighteningly wrong: "As long as you have an HD card built into the set, you can watch any channel in HD." Does that include terrestrial channels, and Freeview? "Yes, you can watch Freeview in HD if you've got a set with the HD card built in." Absolutely incorrect, of course, but similar to the answers CableWorld got from <u>salespeople in the US</u>. This is why I'm such a big fan of salesperson disintermediation.</p>



I wouldn't want to be that salesguy the first time he sells an £8000 TV set and then the buyer figures out that they have to watch everything in PAL format for another year.</p>

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