>> Cost, both for producing the TV and for producing the content.
>
> Producing the content I can understand. It presumably costs more money to 
> shunt larger volumes of data around...

For the same size TV, increased resolution (smaller pixels) is more 
expensive for many reasons:
- Bigger backlight needed
- More/bigger driver ICs
- More expensive components due to higher pixel clock rate
- More RAM for frame buffer
- More powerful DSP/CPU for manipulating frame buffer
- More connections to the panel (worse reliability)
- Panel yield reduced due to roughly constant probability of pixel failure

> How is it *cheaper* to design something more complicated?

Because not everyone can afford the top of the range model.  It's a well 
known economics method to introduce several products with varying 
performance and price to get more money overall.

> No. But you would think that making a large monitor with a high resolution 
> would be much cheaper than making a small monitor with a high resolution.

No, the cost of panel area outweighs all the things I mentioned above. 
Every LCD factory is run at almost 100% capacity, they measure income in $ 
per square metre, a panel that is twice the size is going to be roughly 
twice the cost (plus or minus a bit depending on the factors I mentioned 
above).

> Some movies are widescreen. But by no means all of them. Besides, the time 
> spent watching movies is utterly dwarfed by the time spent watching normal 
> TV - which is never widescreen.

Funny how radiotimes.com indicates almost every TV program is broadcast in 
widescreen :-)  You need to fix your TV if you are not seeing a widescreen 
picture from normal TV.

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