Today's High-Def Headlines

CEA: Super Bowl Boosts HD-Set Sales - B&C
More than 2.4 million HDTV sets will be sold due to Super Bowl XLII, according to a research study conducted by trade group the Consumer Electronics Association and advocacy group Sports Video Group. The sales of sets to viewers who want to use them to watch the Big Game will generate $2.2 billion in wholesale dollars, according to the third annual “Sports and Technology” survey conducted by the CEA and SVG.

The Unavoidable Update - NY Times
While people like to complain that there is nothing to watch on television, about 21 million American households may find that literally true in February 2009. On the 17th of that month, most TV stations will quit broadcasting analog TV signals over the air, and older sets will go blank. But remarkably, half of the country does not realize a changeover is coming, according to a survey by the Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing.

AT&T: Pair-Bonding to Come in ‘Late 2008’ - Telephony
AT&T said today it expects to begin pair-bonding advanced DSL lines in “late 2008,” pushing back the expected arrival of what the company says is an important part of its fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) initiative. AT&T has long cited the promise of pair-bonding in response to criticisms regarding the bandwidth limitations of its FTTN architecture. Pair-bonding would “not quite double but significantly increase” the bandwidth AT&T delivers to customers’ homes, the company has said, by adding a second pair of copper lines to each house and combining their outputs at the customer premises. Promising the introduction of a “whole-home” digital video recorder service this year as well as a second stream of high-definition television (HDTV), CFO Rick Lindner added, “A third enhancement that will be important to us going forward--because it will enable additional HD streams where they’re required--will be pair-bonding, which we expect late in 2008.”