Rather Becomes HD Ambassador

TVNewsDay has excerpts of Dan Rather‘s speech at the HD World conference yesterday in New York:

“High definition increases the sense of immediacy… When used the right way, high definition has the potential to almost completely remove the so-called fourth wall separating the program from the viewer.

This is exciting for any kind of programming, but I think it is important for news in particular because it mitigates the potential television has sometimes had in the past to take huge events such as wars and natural disasters and shrink them to images that seem neatly contained in a small box. There is a certain removed quality to it.

High definition takes that away. It takes away that layer of removal that can lull us, at times, into thinking that the far away events we see on television are somehow less real.” More…