HDTV a step-change to catastrophe?

Ow, now you’re all thinking I’ve got a downer on HDTV, which is actually a long way from the truth.

I have been trawling through the recent HD announcements here in the UK, including this meagre offering from the BBC.

I found myself being rather disappointed with the fact that HDTV had been referred to as merely “a step change in television technology” which in my book undersold the massive leap forward in technology that HDTV represents.

Then I thought that maybe I was ignorant, and didn’t understand the true meaning of the term ’step change’. Not having that, I decided to do some research.

I typed definition “step change” into Google, and was amazed to find several references to HDTV!

I then stumbled upon the ever-useful Wikipedia definition. How do they do that? They have more information about stuff than you can shake a stick at.

OK, it comes back with:

“In common usage a step change happens when a situation changes in a discontinuous way: a big policy change after an election, a currency devaluation, the discovery of gold at Sutters mill for example. That is to say, a change like a step in an otherwise smooth graph.
This concept has been borrowed from mathematics and technology where the phrase step function is rigorously defined.
Catastrophe theory is one mathematical theory used to explain step changes.”

Well, I was doing just fine until that last bit!

I hope that catastrophe and chaos don’t play a major part in the HDTV rollout.

I suspect that ’step change’ is just the latest phrase we’ll have to suffer from the marketing-type plebs until they find something else annoying.

Oh, and while I’m here, the Wikipedia definition of pleb ends thus:

“In British and Australian English pleb continues in use as a derogatory term for someone inferior, common or ignorant, who may be described as being a pleb, plebby or a plebhead. See also: pikey” …which made me LOL!

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