I would think the recession would have obviously increased the number of OTA viewers

10%? I highly doubt that, especially with the digital transition along with the recession. A lot of people can't afford their cable or satellite bills, and basic cable only provides analog SD (unless you have QAM, which then the only HD channels are your locals) To get HD non-local cable channels, you end up needing to pay over $100 a month on Comcast.

videos will only be re-encoded to 1080p if their source resolution is 1080p (or at least higher than 720p)

That's what the extension would do. CableCARD is essentially encrypted QAM, so the CableCARD extension + QAM tuner would decrypt the QAM signal and re-encrypt with some kind of DRM (probably done by media center I suppose)

I personally wouldn't buy a whole new tuner card to get CableCARD functionality, but I would definitely buy an extension that upgrades my current QAM tuner to have CableCARD support.

Here's an example of how that could work:
http://i38.tinypic.com/5015qh.jpg

So far yeah, but surely there would be a way to extend QAM tuners for CableCARD capabilities right? Such as a USB or front bay cablecard extension of some kind.

Will it be possible for current CAM capable tuners to be upgraded using a cablecard extension of some kind?

Has anybody tested this disc on a non-PS3 blu-ray player?

HD isn't working for me. When I choose any movie or TV show, even when it says HD on it, they are all playing at 480p. I was wondering if maybe this is a connection issue, I don't have the greatest WiFi connection in my room.

Was Fringe new? I didn't watch because I thought it came back next week.

99% of their viewers wouldn't know or care about things like this, as long as it *sounds* realistic enough I don't complain.