Funny, I still jump over commercials regardless they are HD or not...

Saw my first HD Commercial/16:9 by Target.

It was on ExpressVu/Boston Legal.

I saw a Mastercard on CBS, Ipod, Target and IBM all on CBS last night.

Target commercials also have great audio.....

Even if they make them in 3D, I will still skip them.

The HD commercials actually present a annoyance for me. When skipping commercials while whatching a 16:9 show, I watch for the side bars to go away to know when to stop fast-forwarding (then press the instant replay button to continue watching).

When an HD commercial comes on, I will be "tricked" into thinking that the commercial break has ended and start watching the commercial.

I guess this is a good thing for the advertiser. It causes me to watch part of their commercial ;) . So, until HD ad's become commonplace, the vendors that use them have an advantage.

I may be wrong but wouldn't HD commercials increase the size of the file on a PVR recorder show. The HD-PVR hard drives are already too small for most people, last thing we need is high quality commercials.

I may be wrong but wouldn't HD commercials increase the size of the file on a PVR recorder show.
Doubtful...not in a meaningful way anyways. The SD commercials are still broadcast in whatever HD format the channel provides, so they're already taking up the bandwidth of an HD commercial. It's not like the channel switches broadcast formats during commercials...just aspect ratios.

Wouldn't the 4:3 commercials compress much further because of the black bars?

Wouldn't the 4:3 commercials compress much further because of the black bars?
Yes, to some extent...which is why I said 'not in a meaningful way'.

Assuming that a 16x9 picture is what? 33% bigger than a 4x3 picture. So per-hour of recording, that's probably an increase in file-size of ~%10 percent or so based on ~18 minutes of commercials per hour. But that assumes that those bars compress perfectly, which they don't, and a constant bitrate for all material. So maybe less than a 10% increase.

But given the amount of space on the 160Gb model, I just don't think one would see any noticable difference in the amount of space used.

I wonder whether the algorithm used for compressing the original 1+ GB/sec stream to just under 20 Mb/sec (a compression factor of over 50) is even capable of "selective" compression of an area of the image...

I wonder whether the algorithm used for compressing the original 1+ GB/sec stream to just under 20 Mb/sec (a compression factor of over 50) is even capable of "selective" compression of an area of the image...
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you here, but yes, I'm sure it is. If I understand MPEG-2 compression correctly, and I very-well might not, given that it does a lot of it's calculations based on parts of the image that haven't changed, that takes into account a large portion of your picture. I don't think it has to choose to be selective, rather it's selective by design.

I don't for a minute think that if you have an hour of black-bars, that those black bars will add nothing at all to the size of the file, but I suspect they'd add less than if there were moving data in that space.

And yes, that's a gross over-simplification of MPEG-2 compression. :) And feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Saw a new commercial for Lincoln in HD on CBS today. It didn't register, then I rewound it and noticed it was in HD. Very cool. It was the second ad I saw in HD, the other was the Silver Bullet Coors Light commercial.

Add to that Sirius Sat Radio (American).

Bell ExpressVu had an HD commercial during Invasion on CTV-HD.

I found it amusing because almost all of the commercial took place in an ultra-low-res picture which was supposed to look like a cell-phone display.

I get the commercial when they're advertising their cell service, but it seems a real waste to advertise your HD service like that. :)

Although I don't think their 'most HD channels' pitch is really all that true since I have access to more than the 28 channels they claim is the most from any canadian provider...now if they said they had more HD content, that I could buy...since there are more than a few HD channels on my list that really aren't all that HD at all. :)

Saw a HD ad for Naria yesterday. It looked really good. It didnt sink in at first that it was hd but half way through it hit me no black bars.

Just caught an HD ad for Hitachi during the Calgary-NJ game on TSN-HD.

That Samsung one with Dan Marino and his QB friends just looks awesome! Enough to make me stop my skipping through the commercials (and, believe me, it takes a lot to stop my skipping)

Saw an HD commercial of a Mississauga Italian restaurant. It's the owner's little daughter introducing their restaurant. Quite neat!

Today's HD commercials so far, duing the AFC game:
Every IBM commercial
AT&T
and Acura (excellent HD ad, looked 3-D)