Revolution will not support HD

Right, but those same interconnects are of course used with professional gear, and in all honesty, 99% of "digital" broadcast signals (mostly everything but HD) are originated from an analog signal. They basically use expensive hardware realtime encoders to take the analog input (whether it be composite, s-video, or component - RF is never used in such a situation) and typically encode to MPEG-2, although there are MPEG-4 hardware encoders, as well as a few for various streaming media formats. So technically, when you hear DirecTV and DISH Network saying "100% digital quality", it's a lie, since all of their digital signals start out somewhere as an analog signal. The digital broadcast method can result in better imagery, although as mentioned before low bitrate channels impede this somewhat. When I said "analog is limited to RF", I was speaking solely in terms of terrestrial broadcast (and cable). That's why I said "digital broadcast" and "analog broadcast" leading up to that, I was merely responding to blackzc's assertion that digital is neither better nor worse, but just different.

Of course there is the movement towards fully digital interconnects, such as DVI, IEEE-1394, HDMI, etc. But for now, most systems use analog component as the 'base' transport for HD signals, even if they do support digital transports. You can be highly sure that, no matter what other HD inputs and outputs your devices have, that you can always connect via component (however, as with everything, this isn't always true).

 

I get the worst of both worlds - crap analogue cable mostly sourced from Sky Digital! Then again I am connecting 3 TVs to one connection without any amplifier dealy, which probably isn't helping.

A lot of countries still use VHF and UHF - UHF is generally better quality-wise, but doesn't travel far as well, especially if there's hills and crap in the way. You only need two aerials if you need to receive transmissions from both UHF and VHF, or two different transmitters - I think this is an issue in Japan as some of the smaller/local channels are on UHF whereas the big network stations are generally on VHF.

The UK was weird as they only ever broadcast 625 line (or PAL when it got colourified) content on UHF, and VHF band III was kept strictly for crappy old 405-line stuff (I don't think band I was used at all for TV). So in the UK there was never a need to sell PAL TVs with UHF tuners. Fucking annoying for me when I moved to Ireland though! We took two TVs with us, and we couldn't use either of them for cable as that's all on VHF and Hyperband! Aaaag!
Ireland's a weird country localisation-wise - we're the only country in Europe to get some models of TVs with both PAL-I and UHF and VHF *and* UK-type plugs, we're possibly the only country to get right-hand-drive Opels (except maybe Cyprus), we get European-spec right-hand-drive Toyotas (ones sold in the UK seem to be different)... seriously, WTF?

I'd say it's a bit less than 99% these days. Though Betacam SP is still very common (which stores video as luma/chroma like s-video), most broadcasters are migrating to DigiBeta or DV-based formats, which could technically be kept digital all they way (though they'll still have to be re-encoded to MPEG-2 to be transmitted). Any broadcasters who use composite video along the line SHOULD BE SHOT. I've never seen this happen with modern PAL broadcasts, thank God.