LATEST ADDITIONS

Remarkable things are happening in the plasma-display market. Just the other day I saw one for sale in Costco for under $6000. Costco! While one might ponder the cosmic significance of plasma televisions at a warehouse retailer, there's no denying that these displays attract a lot of attention. A big, flat screen hanging on the wall has universal appeal.

Anyone who's set up a home theater system knows how much work is involved. Once you find the right TV and speaker system, you need to round up a stack of components, including a DVD player, a video recorder, and, perhaps, a satellite receiver. Then you have to spin a frightening web of wires to route all of those signals through your A/V receiver or preamp/surround processor.

One of the primary obstacles to getting high-bandwidth video such as HDTV to the home via cable is the limited signal-carrying capacity of what is termed "the last mile." Currently, cable modem users share a data pipe with TV channels that can carry about 30 megabits-per-second (mbps) into their homes.