Funny how fast things happen. This morning I blogged about the changes Brockhaus and Polaroid have to go through because of the digital revolution. And I asked, who would be next in joining them. Tonight, it turns out it’s German commercial TV broadcast group ProSiebenSat.1!

OK, it’s not exactly the end of TV that happens today, but its the preliminary end of a technology that came to change our sense of quality of TV content: High Definition Television. The Munich-based broadcast giant said today they would stop their HDTV programmes ProSieben HD and Sat.1 HD. Only 150.000 households in German have the technical prerequisites today to receive and display HD programmes. Too few to justify the production cost, although the only content that was true HD were Hollywood blockbusters, the rest was scaled-up to HD. From 2010 on, their management said, they might consider coming back to HD as the group will have an additional satellite transponder channel and more capacity for high-resolution signals.

The TV business truly is an interesting one. Broadcasters in Germany have been extremely slow to embrace the Internet and integrate web offerings in their programmes. For the privately-held, advertising funded stations the web still is little more than a place to promote their shows and series. Public broadcasters ARD and ZDF are funded by each and every household by law (paying 55 Euro per quarter) and have billions to spend on online activities – much to the dislike of the private companies, of course. At least they have started some decent web initiatives offering self-produced content like news shows and magazine programmes in online video archives.

Now, the technology that was so heavily promoted by consumer electronics companies two years ago before the football world cup in Germany, is being abandoned even before its breakthrough. That’s not just sad, it’s short-sighted. As a consumer, I feel betrayed. Why would I pay €1500+ for a brand-spanking-new flatscreen HD ready TV, if not – at least on the medium run – for having a dramatically improved viewing experience? HD is great for entertainment, for Hollywood on the big flat screen at home. It had the chance to kill movie theatres and now failed. Or did it?

Maybe not. In this country, federally organised and regulated, we have so many players claiming their stakes, securing their grounds, fighting for dominance. It’s unlike any other TV market in the world. We have 30+ free TV channels, at least 10 of them with decent to high-quality programmes. We have Premiere, the only pay TV company (with HD channels by the way). But we also have an extremely heterogeneous landscape when it comes to accessing the TV signal. In larger cities, most have cable right into their homes. In rural areas, and that’s still the majority of the households, satellite is the technology of choice, terrestrial signals have been changed to DVB-T in many regions a few years ago but still don’t offer HD quality. HD, as ProSiebenSat.1 broadcast it, came via satellite. Both, cable and satellite demand different technical equipment (i.e. set-top boxes). Not very user friendly, that is!

So as long as the technical requirements, or barriers I should say, are so high mass market adoption of HD TV will be hard to achieve. It’s up to the entire entertainment and consumer electronics industry to come up with something really simple, really easy to use. But as long as vanity reigns and industry egoisms prevent an open discussion, the consumer will just be an afterthought and HD will take a few more years to make its breakthrough. Maybe even longer than 2010.

In the meantime, the Internet is here to change the game and bring HD to our PCs – and even flat-screen TVs as Apple suggests. Probably more quickly than the TV dinosaurs would like it to. But that’s a different story.