>> I mean, if you're going to force everybody to buy a new TV, new
>> receiver, new type of disk and a new machine to play it, why it increase
>> the resolution *significantly*? Why only increase it by a small amount?
>> I don't understand that.
> 
> Partly bandwidth related. The UHF/VHF frequency space has only a certain 
> amount of bandwidth per channel. Now, while a HD broadcast in 1080p at 
> an "acceptable" compression ratio might fit nicely within the allotted 
> bandwidth for a channel, doubling the horizontal and vertical 
> resolution, for example quadruples the number of pixels on the screen. 
> Eventually, the video would need to be compressed to the point where the 
> image would be nothing more than a macroblock-fest.

Quadrupling the number of pixels doesn't necessarily mean that the 
*compressed* signal takes more bandwidth. I'm sure I'm not the first 
person to notice that using higher resolutions tends to make the video 
more compressible. (Although, sure, I imagine there's a limit to how far 
you can feasibly go.)

Then again, since we replaced our old CRT with a shiny new LCD, suddenly 
I notice that just about *everything* on TV has DCT artifacts all over 
it. (I guess the CRT was too blurry to show this.) It's quite annoying.

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