OMG TOO COMPLICATED FOR THE AVERAGE CONSUMER

Of course it does, to you, me, or any modern gamer or technophile who gets turned on by higher pixel count. It matters to your average electronics store, who was pushing HDTV's like crazy this holiday season. Heck, local news here in the Midwest states was like watching an advertisement for HD as people from Target "informed" us about the next generation of television for low, low prices. They even finished it off with some misinformation icing: That analog TV signals will be cut off in 2009. This is true, but that only means you need a digital cable box, not an HDTV.

But what about the average person who doesn't wake up in the morning to check Destructoid or Gizmodo? Honestly, I think this is all beyond them. There are two cases I can recall this holiday season that make me think the road to total HD domination will be a long and rough one.

Case 1: I was in a Best Buy with Christmas money in hand to buy a copy of Civ IV Gold (old yes, but I didn't have it yet, so whatever.) There was for some reason only one register open in the entire store, so I got stuck waiting in a long line. Behind me was a guy hefting a small 19 inch 720p tv. Trying to make conversation and act like I wasn't a complete sociophobe, I decided to ask him what he was going to do with it. He told me he was putting it in a bedroom. Not what I meant.

I decided to try to make it clearer: "Are you going to be watching movies on it with BluRay or HD-DVD? Maybe you're going to play your 360 or PS3 on it? Maybe upgrade your cable package and just watch television with dazzling detail?" Nope. He was just going to watch standard def cable on an HD TV. He probably won't even be bothered by the fact that his picture looks like blurry shit.

Case 2: My grandma was over for the holidays. She's a nice lady, but when this happens I have to put up with her and my mother discussing politics and technology with horribly misinformed points of view. So, one time she and I were watching the local news and she asked me to explain the whole HD thing to her (yet another HD newsvertisement was on). Well, the fact that you need to pay more for HD channels was as far as I was able to get. She absolutely refused to even attempt to process ANYTHING that had to do with the technical side of the subject, and I wasn't even going that technical (720p was less expensive, but less detail. 1080p was more expensive, but more detail. That's IT!) She gives me this line that she's to old to learn anything different i.e. she doesn't care enough to bother.

I dunno, maybe I live in the wrong town and associate with the wrong people. But while I applaud all these businesses' push to move everyone to HD, looks like we're going to have to wait for an iPodesque stroke of genius to dumb down this thing to the level dumb people will understand.