I hope that this doesn't make its way to other channels...I have two TV's that are component only, lack HDMI. One has no HDMI port at all, the other's doesn't work properly. It was built in 04 or 05, and face it, HDMI sucked back then. It had lots of issues in the beginning, and devices from those days didn't always play nice with HDMI.
In seriousness, this shouldn't be legal. Back when the color TV came out, there were regulations to ensure that black and white TV's would be able to display color signals. Now, we have content providers forcibly making old sets incompatible, to some extent or another. That's not right.