Dave Winer says yes:

Dave Zatz wonders whether it's time to get HD. Yes, yes, yes. If you want to help figure all this stuff out, we need you to have the new eyes that you get from HD. Think about it this way. If there was an upgrade available for your eyes that gave you 3D vision when you just had 2D, would you pay $1500 for that? Yes, it is that big a difference, imho.

Yeah, maybe if you live in one of the top 10 or 20 TV markets, Dave is right. I live in the #45 TV market, and I've had HDTV capabilities for two years now, and I don't advise anyone here to make the investment in it yet.

Why? Because the local stations and providers screw it up all the time (and yes, Mike, I almost literally mean that).

All five major networks broadcast in HDTV in Oklahoma City, but honest to God, they just don't take it very seriously, and there are strong indications that the management of most of these stations just doesn't give a damn. Cox OKC's digital cable refuses to carry either the Fox or ABC local HD affiliates (KOKH-DT for Fox, KOCO-DT for ABC) because the station owners (Sinclair Broadcasting and Hearst/Argyle of Ohio/Oklahoma, respectively) demand extra payments to carry their digital stations and Cox refuses to pay it. DirecTV will start carrying them in MPEG-4 by the end of the year (so you can only get them with DirecTV's own HD receivers and recorders, not the TiVo one), but like all HD over satellite, it will be far, far more compressed than the picture over the air - and will cost you more money.

Cox dropped KOCO-DT on October 1 after the previous contract expired, which meant Cox customers did not get the OU-Texas game in HD unless they had an over-the-air (OTA) antenna. The very next day, on Sunday, KOCO decided it needed to do "some work" on its digital transmitter - so it went dark for two days. It is unimaginable that a commercial network TV affiliate would take its signal off the air for two days, but that's just what they did for the digital signal - if you didn't have analog OTA capabilities (and I don't), ABC was just gone for two days.

Not one of the OKC stations has spent the money on the technology necessary to superimpose graphics over an HD signal, nor can they even record or rebroadcast HD signals. If they don't pass along the network HD feed as it's being broadcast nationally, it won't be in HD here. KFOR-DT can't show Jeopardy in HD, just as KOCO-DT can't show Wheel of Fortune in HD, even though both shows are broadcast that way as of this season.

Therefore, whenever a station wants to broadcast something like weather information, they either don't put it on the HD feed (which is usually fine with me) or they drop into SD to add it. KFOR (the NBC affiliate owned by and up for sale by the New York Times Company) is particularly bad about this, dropping high-quality NBC shows like Law & Order and ER into SD so they can impose a map about severe weather that's far outside of KFOR-DT's broadcast area.

This is especially annoying because KFOR uses one of its four digital channels (4-2) for a 24/7 weather channel (NBC Weather Plus) that never has any live weather on it. Even while KFOR-TV is wall-to-wall tornado warnings, KFOR-DT's 4-2 channel is showing taped weathercasts from 6 hours ago and live NBC Weather Plus feeds about fog in New Jersey. They have a 24/7 weather channel and won't use it for severe weather, but drop the HD signal for "severe weather" that does not affect anyone receiving their HD signal. Usually, after the weather map goes away, the signal stays in SD for several minutes or, perhaps, all night. There are signs of improvement, but historically, KFOR just hasn't cared whether they broadcast in HD or not. (I have ranted about this many times at HDTVOK.com.)

Even in 2006, three years after most of them started broadcasting in HD and over a year after they had to start doing it full time, almost every station turns off the HD for local commercials or programs and then forgets to turn it back on. Right now, I'm watching The Late Show with David Letterman, and sure enough, at 10:35 PM, KWTV-DT was broadcasting it in standard definition. I waited a few minutes, but nothing happened. I tried to call the main switchboard, but as with every local station, none of the actual engineering staff is there during prime time. (Take a few minutes to think about that.) I knew the trick, though - you call the news desk and say "I'm sorry to bother you, but would you tell operations that you're not broadcasting in HD and haven't been for the past __ minutes?" I did that tonight, and as usual, within 60 seconds the HD signal returned.

This is no way to run a technology. The major markets may be different, but out here, HDTV is not ready for prime time. The equipment will cost less in 2007-2008 and, if there is a God, the local stations will get better at it, at least to the point where they can do normal TV operations like superimpositions and recording and playback of with HD signals. Right now, it's just incredibly frustrating.

And this is not to even mention OETA, which finally, in August, started broadcasting its local signal over its digital channels (KETA-DT 13-1 in OKC), about 18 months after the FCC mandated it. Until August, OETA was simply rebroadcasting the PBS-HD signal over 13-1 and other channels, sometimes merging its four channels together to just one for true HD-quality shows. Now 13-1 is OETA, 13-2 is "OETA Oklahoma" with wall-to-wall OETA local programming (not bad), 13-3 is "OETA You", mostly a rebroadcast of the national "PBS You" feed that both Dish Network and DirecTV dropped this year because no one cared, and 13-4 is "OETA Kids," mostly a rebroadcast of PBS Kids.

This is not bad - aside from the fact that KETA couldn't get its program grid right for over a month so it was impossible to record shows on 13-1 because all of the information was wrong, of course. That got fixed less than a week ago.

However, the PBS HD signal was useful - it contained programs that OETA refuses to broadcast over its analog channel because they're insufficiently conservative (a topic I covered here and here. That signal is still available - if you subscribe to Cox digital cable. If you want public television over the free airwaves, you can't get PBS-HD. If you're willing and able to pay for expensive digital cable, you can have access to public television. This is how OETA works.

All the stations have to turn off their analog signals, the ones they've been using for 60+ years, in March 2009. So, presumably, by late 2008, they'll all know how to broadcast HD, remember to pay enough attention so that they don't leave the HD signal off for minutes or hours, treat it seriously enough to not go dark for 2-3 days (did I mention that KFOR-DT lost an HD transmitter part this weekend and broadcast SD through Tuesday because they didn't have a spare? Can you imagine a TV station broadcasting in black-and-white for two days because they didn't have replacement parts?), and stop referring (as KWTV-DT is doing right now to "HD news helicopters" when they don't broadcast one single frame of that video in HD and never have.

Dave is right that HDTV is beautiful and changes the way you look at TV - when it works. Out here, it doesn't work right too much of the time. It's too much work for people who aren't technophiles. It's not time to buy yet.