After seeing a few posts about LCD vs. Tube TVs, it got me thinking. I don't watch much TV in Vegas, but occasionally I might watch a game I have a bet on in my room for a while, and I usually watch a little bit of the news as I'm getting ready. It seems like very few hotels actually have HDTV despite having flat screen TVs. Why update all your tube TVs and not get HD connected? What's the point? It's like buying a brand new computer with the fastest hardware available, and then still using a dial up connection to surf the web.
Because hd requires cable boxes for each room and a ton more cost for the hotel. They do have hd in the skylofts and mansion.
Yeah that's what they do in the skylofts and mansion. Still costs a ton of money compared to what they have normally.
HDVT requires a lot more bandwidth then standard TV. The cost isn't so much the cable boxes and cable cards but the infrastructure to support the increased bandwidth. City Centre has HDTV throughout.
The big picture on why they are replacing tube TVs with flat panels is $. The tube TVs are getting too expensive to maintain and most have reached their expected lifetime already. Cheaper to go in and do a large group buy with a major price discount. Flat panels are cheap and then call it a room upgrade. And it is, even if no HD, but MSS replaced all their TVs and they now do have HD. Of course they eliminated free lobby WiFi and now want you to buy it for a $9.95 daily room charge. They treat me well there, but not enough to get room WiFi comped. At least not so far.
The last few trips, some of the hotels did have limited HDTV channels available. But it was more local and I don't recall sports channels at all.
I'm 90% sure that I recall Mandalay Bay having quite a few HD channels on the main TV in the regular rooms, including (I think) ESPN and ESPN2, along with the broadcast channels. Bathroom TVs were SD only, though. This is both true and untrue. While HD video requires more bandwidth, it's also transmitted from the headend in a highly compressed form -- that's why the same coax cable you used with your old cable box still worked when you upgraded to HD. The issue is dealing with the encryption; any modern HDTV will have a QAM tuner to decompress unencrypted HD, and I wouldn't be surprised if the big resorts (which have their own specialty cable packages to begin with) have a setup with Cox where they get unencrypted feeds into the building that can be handled by a TV without a cable box.
HD TV My first experience with HD was staying at Paris a few years ago. It was a few channels, but it made me realize that not all programs need HD, like the local news. You could see the make-up and wrinkles on the reporters.