I will have to say that rbinck has done an excellent job of quantifying the trade off.
Some viewers like me place less stress on super high picture quality and want more content diversity, other viewers will demand a super high picture quality, and television station operators do have the option to shut off their other multicasts for certain high profile programming.
Since the OTA business model is still financed largely by revenue from television commercials, the television station operators will still be driven by maximizing total revenues. The downside is, if the viewers quit watching, the amount of revenue they get per commercial minute drops with it.
It shall be interesting to see how various station managers approach the trade off dilemma. But if 19 million bits per second if the allocated maximum per channel, the only way to get that illusive more may be using more advanced compression techniques, and maybe a subscription market for set top converter boxes may open up later, and they could either stress a higher quality picture or more content diversity.
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High definition is not the definition of my life.
But knowledge is power and HD does have some potential to increase content variety and choices.
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