Reminds me of Negroponte's observation (in his book Being Digital from sometime in the mid 1990s). At the time, digital television was hung up in debates about what high-definition standard to use. He said that for most people most of the time, standard def was fine and that in focusing on a level of "quality" that most people did not care about, a lot of other potentially interesting and useful things you could do in the same bandwidth were not being developed. At least, that's what I recall now. It's been at least 10 years since I looked at that book.
Although it seems now that for most people HD is something they notice and care about. So perhaps that hints at the need for people to be trained to appreciate quality?
In other words, do they like HD because it's better or because they've been told that it's better?
I noticed a difference immediately when I saw an HD demo. It was in 1999, and I saw it at a science center (COSI, Columbus, OH). But some of the people I was with literally could not figure out which TV was which.
