Let a thousand HD sets bloom

When you buy your first high-def television set, be sure to say thank you to the Chinese taxpayers who made it possible. China is spending an insane $40 billion on the summer Olympics in Beijing next summer, much of it to build new stadiums wired top-to-bottom with fiber-optic cable. The main beneficiary of that will be American TV viewers, who will get 756 hours of high-definition coverage of the Olympics -- nearly double the amount from the last summer Olympics in Greece. NBC Sports executive producer David Neal, speaking at an industry conference in New York Wednesday, predicted all that high-def coverage will be the tipping point for HD sets in America: "It will be a signature moment for the adoption of high-definition as a mainstream delivery medium for consumers," he said,  predicting that more than half of all U.S. households will have high-def sets by the end of 2008.