h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the long term HDTV will become mainstream provided that the existing
broadcasters wish to adopt it. There is a trend to produce many poor quality
channels than fewer with quality programming. I hope that quality will
prevail over quanity. Most viewers are willing to watch very poor quality
pictures. If they were given the choice of a video recorder that would record
three hours worth of good quality pictures, or one that would record nine hours
of poor quality, I am afraid the choice would be the latter. Neverless
there is a future for HDTV but it will be slower in arriving than I would like.
The areas which would benefit first would be large screens showing sporting events
in public bars and similar venues.

This is an interesting-to-me conversation because I've been on-and-off tracking the development of HDTV....wondering when it would become a going-concern.
The good news for the rest of us is that the Early Adopters (those that jump on infant technologies and wait for the rest of us to catch up) will be footing the bill for the rest of us.
The bad, or less good news is that the teleivison industry, from what I understand, is still squabbling over which standard to make a standard, how to fuse (or not) this video technology with the computer monitor (as the computer industry wants, and probably the rest of us don't), and how to justify to their investors the incredible expense of getting rid of all that lovely NTSC/PAL/SEACAM equipment that still works perfectly well as they buy up the new widescreen digital technology. Phew, talk about run-on sentences.
Anyway, this is the marvellous catch: consumers won't buy something there's nothing to watch on (unless they're mad about Japanese programming) and the tv people won't broadcast anything until there's an audience.
HDTV tripe is going to be harder to watch than the current tripe (for those that do), so with any luck there won't be as much. (Fat chance).
I rather suspect that HDTV is going to be treated in much the same way as IMAX was: the format's terrific: what do we do with it?

I was struck by reference to MP 2. That's kinda old by now (as the computer industry ages things). Do you know of any plans to upgrade that to something more efficient? Or possibly a wider bandwidth or something?