Back in February of 2001, I gave a brief, capsule history (as opposed to a long capsule history...) of HDTV in America in Nuts & Volts magazine, as the intro to a feature article whose text is sadly not available online:

In the US, HDTV began entering the public’s eye in the mid to late 1980s. This was the period when the nation was in awe of Japan. Remember when Hollywood cranked out films like Gung Ho, Black Rain, and Rising Sun? When the Japanese stock market was going through the roof? It was against this backdrop that the FCC made HDTV sound like a national emergency. As Jeff Taylor, the author of Reason magazine’s weekly email newsletter on technology and politics (www.reason.com) describes it, “This was the period when the Japanese were building great cars. They were building all of the consumer electronics. We used to lead the world in those areas. What are we going to do for technology? They’re going to do digital television, so we should do something about that. So that’s what got a lot of people in the FCC being very concerned about HDTV. So you have that whole backdrop of, ‘The government has to get involved or this is not going to get done right.’”

Unfortunately, the combination of government hearings, competition between the phone companies, the cable companies and the networks, and the general ramp up time that a new technology always faces, especially one designed to replace a very entrenched existing technology, meant a very, very long gestation period.

During which, in the mid-1990s, the Internet gave a tremendous boost to the phone and computer industries. So it was now doubly important that the television get HDTV off the ground.

If you noticed, one thing I haven’t mentioned is consumer interest, and feedback. As Taylor describes it, “At no part in this process, was anyone saying, ‘what about the average consumer out there who might want to look at this high definition television?’ I think that has been the missing link all along in that no one has tried to figure out if there is a market demand for this and how would you go about filling it if there was. So what we have is all of these different interests motivated by different things, trying to come up with a system that the general public may or may not want. This has taken up a better part of a decade now, just to get to the point where we just might start building things.”

By early 1998, HDTV antennas were starting to appear on skyscrapers, mountains and other locations with sufficient height across the US, along with early programming. Today, HDTV is firmly entrenched, and even with the deadline to discontinue all analog over-the-air broadcasting pushed back to 2009, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) wants to fund digital converter boxes for those few remaining viewers, despite the seemingly universal prescence of digital and analog cable, and satellite TV.

In Tech Central Station, Glenn Reynolds writes:

I suppose that there are worse ways to waste the taxpayers' money -- I can't actually think of any at the moment, but given Congress's ingenuity I suppose that Ted Stevens and his colleagues probably could -- but this strikes me as pretty pathetic, especially when the government is laying off scientists for lack of money. Subsidizing TV and starving science seems like a recipe for something short of national greatness.

Meanwhile, technology is, as usual, passing Congress by. Because while the long-planned switch to HDTV creeps along, video technology is advancing by leaps and bounds in areas that, in what I'm pretty sure isn't really a coincidence, Congress hasn't managed to get its hands on yet. The result, widespread video podcasting, is likely to bring about something far more revolutionary than higher resolution commercial broadcasts: It might actually produce TV that people want to watch.

Podcasting is already big, with people producing "radio" programs for Internet distribution using nothing more than a computer and an Internet connection. Video podcasting will make producing and distributing TV programming nearly as easy. Podcasting and audio MP3 technology have demonstrated pretty clearly that in the audio world people care more about hearing what they want, when they want, than they care about super high sound quality. I suspect that video podcasting will demonstrate the same thing: a pretty good picture coupled with a show that you actually like is worth more than a stupendous picture coupled with a show you don't care about that much. And according to some people, the Video iPod is already good enough to ensure that video podcasting will be "huge."

If Congress cared about promoting video distribution technology, it could do a lot -- without even spending taxpayer dollars -- by reforming intellectual property law to make it easier on amateur producers and distributors. (Some general advice on that, from J.D. Lasica, can be found here.) That seems like a better enterprise than forking out taxpayer dollars to help buy set-top boxes, but one that's unlikely to materialize since it would involve making the entertainment industry unhappy.

On the other hand, I should probably be thankful that Congress doesn't seem to "get" the coming video revolution. As its behavior with HDTV has demonstrated, Congress isn't much good at helping new technologies along anyway, and it may well be that in these overregulated times technologies need to be fast, nimble, and below the radar to flourish. In the 21st Century, at least, Congress's biggest contribution to promoting the progress of science and the useful arts may sometimes be to overlook them until they've become a reality.

That Third Wave technology is advancing beyond the speed of a First Wave institution is a definite feature, not a bug.