I have an HDTV, but...

...am I watching high definition television?

The FCC mandate for most TV stations to begin digital broadcasting (otherwise known as DTV) does not mean that they need to broadcast a high definition program.  So the first thing you have to erase from your mind is that "DTV is equal to HDTV."  The two are totally separate.  DTV allows a broadcaster to provide HDTV, but HDTV is not what is necessarily on DTV.  Huh?

There are many broadcasters who cannot afford the HD programming, are not provided with HD programming or may not have the equipment to process a high definition program for broadcast.  Many stations may choose to, or have no choice but to send their programs out in the old format.

For example, here at PBS Hawaii, our programming consists of children's programs from 5AM to 6PM.  Well, most of these program producers may not feel like spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to convert their perfectly good SD equipment to HD (buying cameras, edit systems, monitors, etc.), so they continue to provide the program in standard-definition...and forgive me for saying, but what 5 year old is going to complain that Barney isn't in HD?  When we get this program here and try to broadcast it both in analog and digital, it will look normal on your analog TV but will have big, black vertical bars on both sides of the program when you view it on your HDTV set because there is not enough picture to fill the entire screen.  In those cases, we reprocess the information and try to fill your HDTV screen out as much as possible without losing too much of the picture or distorting the original picture.

Other stations may choose to display programs differently and it is up to all stations to do what they feel works for them best.  So just because you have an HDTV, it doesn't mean you are watching high-definition programs.