The person who invented the wheel faced an immediate problem.

No wagons.

What good was a wheel  or even four wheels  when no one had a wagon to roll?

So it goes with technological developments, and high-definition television is no exception.

People come up with great ideas, but obstacles prevent popular acceptance.

High-definition TV has struggled with this chicken-egg dilemma for 20 years. Dick Green, president of Cable Television Laboratories Inc. in Louisville, Colo., remembers working on the new technology in 1981 during a broadcast of a National Football League game. He thought the quality would prompt explosive acceptance.

“I did a game between the Rams and Redskins,” he said. “I was convinced after doing it, this was a great new medium. I’m still convinced.”

High-definition TV is wider than standard TV, with greater clarity, due to its increased number of horizontal scanned lines. It works like the dots-per-inch measurement on a printer.

Standard TV, which operates on an analog signal, has 480 lines; HDTV, which is digital, has 720 or 1,080. The extreme detail allows viewers to see blades of grass on a football field.

Mark Cuban, entrepreneurial owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, is so enamored of the technology he recently formed his own high-definition sports network called HDNet. He said he hopes to eliminate the programming issue that has, at least partly, stunted HDTV’s growth.

Cuban acknowledged the chicken-egg dilemma and said, “Yeah, and we’re grooming the chicken.

“No one says ‘I don’t understand it,'” he said. “It’s just a question of, ‘Where can I get it?’ The important question is, where can I watch and where can I get it?

“I look at the hard parts  it’s not creating content and providing content. The harder part is where the rubber meets the road, encouraging people to sell it to people.”

He has visited retail outlets to talk to sales people about hyping those $2,000 high-definition sets. The price has come down from the $15,000 tag that was common upon the technology’s introduction. But media experts still believe consumers are turned off by the price.

And while high definition works best at 45 inches, many people don’t want to dedicate more than 32 inches worth of TV space in their homes.

The other big barrier to the acceptance of HDTV is lack of capacity  or perhaps more precisely, lack of capacity dedicated toward HDTV. In the satellite industry, for instance, one high-definition program takes up the bandwidth normally required for six to eight of the satellite’s normal digital programs.

Over-the-air networks such as ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox are under mandate by the Federal Communications Commission to broadcast entirely in digital signals (necessary for high-definition reception) by 2006. The FCC has set aside extra bandwidth for the networks.

But the networks have projected other uses for that bandwidth, such as two-way, high-speed Internet access  not to mention the possibility of additional programming. The FCC recently appointed a task force to review the transition, with the understanding that the 2006 deadline might be unrealistic.

The cable industry downplays the importance of high definition because the technology takes up three times the “pipe” space as a digital signal. That means less programming, which means less advertising.

“HDTV is on the horizon, and we’re looking at ways to best make this programming available when our customers demand it,” said AT&T Broadband spokeswoman Tracy Baumgartner. “For now, there aren’t that many HDTV sets in customers’ homes and phones aren’t ringing with request for the service, but we know that will change with time.”