trends: “coffee”-style bevvies for dogs, planning HD, and China kicks it up
In this trendwatching podcast, Cathi Bond spies doggy java, a water-and-vitamin combo to give your doggie a coffee-like experience (complete with “coffee” mug) while making sure he’s hydrated. Cathi thinks it’s part of extending nanny culture to our pets.
Meanwhile, Nora Young mentions a very interesting Forbes article on China’s new plans to kick up their economic full court press.
Plus, Cathi has an extensive look ahead at what happens as we move to digital TV, as people get HDTVs and try to marry them with their old DVD players. Here are her notes:
I saw something on Gizmodo about how the FCC is changing their deadline on digital signals. In the States it was supposed to be 2009 and now they’ve adjusted it to 2012
What does this mean? Here are my scattered findings.
I use rabbit ears at the farm and get everything I want. Does this mean that I’m out of luck?
Nope. You can actually use an external antennae on a high def set, provided that you’re close enough to the broadcast tower. But it’ll have to be a special hi-def antennae.
What about my old DVDs? Can I still play them?
Not all DVD players are created equal. Connecting an average DVD player to a High Definition display can be a disconcerting experience. The process of converting a Standard Definition DVD signal to the native resolution of the display may cause a host of video artifacts if not performed properly.
If you have an expensive machine and can connect directly, everything stays digital and it’s tickety boo. If not, everything has to be converted from analogue standard play to digital before it can be played and this frequently causes the video artifacts etc.
My cheapy DVDs don’t have the special adaptor. And I imagine many others don’t either. Quality deinterlacing and scaling are the key components to stable, artifact-free movie watching,
What about watching HDTV on an old analogue set?
You’ll have to an STB a set top box. I have one of those for the DVD up at the farm because the old TV doesn’t have the RCA inputs. My contact at Telecity tells me that the big issue is that when they shut off the analogue signal there will be *no* more free analogue airwaves, ergo the only way you’ll be able to get any existing analogue channels will be through cable. Bye bye rabbit ears, but hello snazzy new HD antennae, which many bloggers say is even better than fibre optic lines.
All for now