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As one of my friends says, standard definition tv must feel like what people in the great depression felt.
SD is the new black and white. Difference is when they invented color, they didn?t keep broadcasting B&W.
SD is a massive waste of bandwidth. It had been illegal to sell SD TV sets for like 20 years now. And when that law was made, the Feds literally gave away HD-to-SD converters to anyone that wanted one.
Enough with the damn SD broadcasting. It?s wasting bandwidth. It is also cluttering up my program guide and occasionally having my DVR record this dead format.
You're mis-remembering a bit. When color first came around, it was only on some network programs (I think Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color was the first), and up until around 1970 even though most of the network programming was color by that time, a lot if not most local programming was still B&W. Full-time color didn't come around until quite a bit later. So, "when they invented color, they didn't keep broadcasting B&W" took several years.
Also it seems you're confusing analog and digital broadcasts. It wasn't exactly illegal to keep selling "SD TV" sets ... they just didn't make analog ones any longer. The government actually gave away analog to digital converters to people who still had the old sets. SD, or Standard Definition, is still alive and well but it's all digital now. It's a lot better resolution than the old analog broadcasts, but it's still SD. Dish still has SD channels, DirecTV probably does, and most cable systems no doubt do. Modern HD and UltraHD sets do a really good job of up converting 480p, or SD, pictures. Probably one of these days 1080i and even 1080p will be obsolete and everything will be 4K ... until something better comes along.
People pitched a hissy fit when they first heard digital was going to be the new standard. But they wouldn't have HD and decent SD now if they'd prevailed, they wouldn't be able to pause a program, and they wouldn't be able to have all the multiple screen insets that we now have (which is not necessarily a good thing). And you wouldn't have subchannels either. Local stations now broadcast a digital signal, but in some cases the signal is hard to receive (trees, if you're in a valley, etc.) compared to the old analog signals.