News today that ABC is continuing to push the quality envelope, by releasing HD-quality streams of its programs this summer. ABC has been progressively increasing quality for some time now and this is the next logical step for them.

For some time I had thought that a potential firewall for local broadcasters was HD broadcasting. But I’m revising my opinion. With new encoding from companies like Move Networks, not to mention ad-supported download options which are inevitable and will have HD-quality, I think it’s clear that HD streaming is going to be widely available. This means ever more pressure on local broadcasters to wean themselves off of dependency on network programming to drive their businesses. I wrote extensively about this in last month's newsletter.