Tube TVs

I'm the first to admit that I'm tech savvy - not quite geeky enough to covet the latest iPad every six months, but far more adept than my Luddite friend Bill, who managed to live on this earth until 2010 before owning a cell phone.

My tech prowess extends to TVs, probably because of my original Radio-TV college degree and aspirations (indeed, I was an on-the-air reporter for a short time on WIBW-TV in Topeka during my sophomore year in college...but I digress).

I clearly remember the very first HDTV I ever saw, much earlier than 99.9% of the population. It was at the 1983 National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, and I was captivated by the incredible realism of the unbelievable 1,080 lines of resolution. Your basic '83 set at home at the time (color, console, 25 inches if you were lucky) only showed about 325 lines of resolution. It was an experience full of the future.

Some 20(!) years later, the display I saw at the convention finally began to trickle into American households, and as I write, over 60% of US households have at least one digital set. Flat screen TVs are ubiquitous, in airline terminals, bars, restaurants, convenience stores...everywhere it seems, except: Hotels.

I travel about 50% right now for my job, and I've seen the inside of virtually every midpriced brand hotel in the country. Courtyard, SpringHill Suites, Holiday Inn Express, Hampton Inn - you name it, I've slept there. So I speak with great authority when I say that the hotel industry is trapped in a bizarre time warp, clutching to their hulking tube-style TVs like a bag lady clutching a rusted shopping cart.

Fully two-thirds of the hotels I patronize are partying like it's 1999 - with ugly, squat, curvy and decidedly low-definition TVs. (Okay, they're a bit more updated than this Polish TV pic - but believe me, not much.)

There are reasons, of course. The HDTV standards took a while to get settled in the 2000s, and hotels tend to use satellite transmission companies for all but their local signals - most don't use the local cable company to bring the signal to you. Those satellite companies have been nothing short of glacial in their attempts to pump a digital and/or high-def signal to room TVs. Hotels also have been clinging to their old models of pay movie systems, made obsolete in just the past couple of years by video streaming over a laptop. Then of course the Great Recession hit, stopping many hotel renovations in their tracks for half a decade.

The result is that while the rest of the world has taken great strides in video technology innovations, to this day you will yet be confronted with your grandma's TV set when you check into any of the major brands of hotels. How quaint.

Some hotels may skip the "first generation" of HDTV altogether and wait for next-gen systems with direct connections to your laptop, iPad, or other device. Then there's 3D. For now, I'd settle for a reasonable widescreen digital picture when I overnight around the country. Unfortunately, I'm not holding my breath.