Not sure I agree with the original article. 1080/60i content (it's 60 fields per second or 30 frames per second) will have all the standard problems of interlacing. The brodcast industry has been dealing with interlacing for years. Whip pans will tear a bit, freeze frames need to have field removal (depending on the speed of the scene), and diagonal lines will render jagged (interlacing is one of many factors there). With a progressive signal 1080/30p for example, all frames are rendered at the same time so most if not all of these issues go away.

Will a general consumer be able to tell the difference? probably not, but it also depends on the source and display they have. Most consumers have a hard time telling the difference of a 480p and 1080p signal on their home HDTVs (show the same people a 480p/1080p signal on calibrated screens and they may be able to tell).

It's not just lines of resolution that make up a picture. In the long term the progressive nature of 1080p will help to really push the quality of the video forward. There's a lot more data to work with there.

I should clarify... iChat h.264 is Mac to Mac only, iChat can do Mac to PC via AIM, but it dumbs the CODEC waaaaaaaay down and looks awful in my opinion.

I would have to say SightSpeed as well. While iChat is nice it's Mac to Mac only, and even then it's high-end Mac to high-end Mac if you want full h.264 multi-party conferencing. Don't get me wrong, iChat is awesome, but in my humble opinion SightSpeed is better.

I did a review of SightSpeed here: http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2006/05/the_best_voicevideo.html

Couple cool things to note:
1 - You can put your parents system on auto-answer so they don't have to do anything. The Audio/Video conference will start automatically on their end, Mac or PC.

2 - It is cross platform and works very well. My wife calls me from her MacBook Pro to my desk on a Windows box. I have also tried Mac to Mac and PC to PC... All solutions work great.

3 - For the best video experiece use their beta codec. I have had zero issues with the beta codec and it looks great.

4 - If your parents want to make a call it's one click to start an audio/video conference. Simply click on the username and the conference call starts as soon as the other party accepts.

5 - Up to 4 way chat is available in the paid version... Only the 4-way initiator needs to have the paid version all other versions can be the free one, but at least one person must buy it. Multi-party conferences work OK, but I would say their strength is 1 to 1.

This has always annoyed me as well. Just because the source is HD and one compresses it down to SD does not mean it's still HD. More often than not I see theis sub-480p content advertised as HD and it really gets under my skin.

That being said, there is some *real* HD content out there. If you're looking for specialized HD content on the web, we're basically talking about bloggers. Our site, http://www.TechnologyEvangelist.com posts everything in 1080p and below, for example (8Mbps 1080p, 6Mbps 720p, etc). There also have MacBreak shooting everything in 1080p (although not distributing in that format yet) via Sony CineAlta's. VERY cool. If you look at Democracy Player (http://www.getdemocracy.com) you'll find a bunch more actual HDTV bittorrent files available. I know that RocketBoom just moved to an HDV comcorder, so we may start to see actual HDTV content from them soon (alas, it may be interlaced, but I'll live).

While I agree with you in concept, and understand where you're coming from, the content is out there in true HDTV via torrents... Just have to know where to look.

I'll go for 720p being the minimum (in my personal opinion, anything interlaced should be kicked off the HD spec, but that's just me). I don't think aspect ratio should be a determining factor though. While uncommon, I have seen some 4:3 HD encodes for some specialty films and whatnot. As long as the resolution is there, the aspect, in my mind does not matter.

Ooooh, I would love some Treo 700w goodness...