Sky are providing some downloadable videos that illustrate the picture quality of their soon-to-be-released HD channels. Go to the Sky HD homepage and then navigate to “Explore Sky HD”, then “More to Explore”, then “HD Video Clips”. Check out the “Rugby in the Rain” video on a big monitor first - yikes!

Windows Media Player on my laptop (a 2Ghz Tecra M2 w Nvidia GeForce Go 128Mb graphics chipset) can barely decode these clips smoothly and I’ve never noticed this machine to be CPU bound before (apart from when I’m doing builds) I must go read the math but HD streams must be _huge_. Fancy that, my next TV will probably have that much (or more) raw processing power.

Not very energy efficient I guess, perhaps it will heat my living room? And I see this when I recently spotted my next TV - I think I’ll wait until it drops in price though, just a little.