So, I’m sitting here watching the football game, and I just saw a new DirecTV commercial. The commercial is mostly old Star Trek footage, but somewhere in the middle of it, Captain Kirk breaks off and starts talking directly to you, the viewer. He’s telling us about how the new view-screen that they put in looks so much better now that the switched to DirecTV, or something like that. Then the narrator comes on and tells us that DirecTV offers HDTV, which looks much better than regular cable. The tag line is something like “DirecTV – better picture quality than cable.”

The funny thing is, though, it’s one of the nicest looking commercials I’ve ever seen in terms of picture quality. And it was on cable. In high definition. I’ve had HDTV for 3 years now, and it’s just now starting to get a mix of high definition commercials and old regular definition commercials, but the HD ones are still pretty rare. It seems strange to me that DirecTV’s commercial, where the entire point is to tell us that DirecTV’s HD looks better than cable, is getting shown in HD on cable. Wouldn’t they have been better off just not making an HD version? Kind of to say, “Hey, this looks kind of bad, right? It would look much beter on DirecTV.” As it is, the commercial makes perfect sense on regular cable, but in high definition, it kind of refutes its own point.

You can see the commercial here (although it obviously won’t be in high definition).