Resolved Universal photo format

I was surprised recently by the fact that a TV I plug a USB drive into, recognized only JPEG photos. I was wondering why it seemed that some photos I had in a folder, didn't appear, only to find out that the pics have to be JPEG.

As universal as GIF and BMP formats are, I'm surprised that this TV (a Toshiba), which was only bought a few months ago (new, I presume) could only handle JPEGs. I mean, this seems to me like designing a car, and then fixing it so that it could only be driven eastwards, or something like that. I really find it hard to believe that allowing a TV to display BMPs and GIFs would be that much more difficult, if it could already display JPEGs.

Is this common at all? Have any of you experienced something like this? I can now save any future photos I d/l as JPEGs (and I got the Faststone Photo Resizer, which can batch convert the photos I already have). I'm just wondering, tho, if I convert them all to JPEG, is it likely at all that at some point in the future, I'll come across hardware that can only read GIFs or BMPs or PNG or TIF? I know that the specs for JPEG are open (not sure about the rest), but I know that the other formats are universal, so I'm still surprised about that.

 

This applies to most of the TVs. They would only display JPEG format.

 

Well that says it all. Since one of the places I teach at seems to be phasing out projectors in favor of larger TVs, I'll simply convert my pics to JPEGs. Most of them are already, anyways.

Thanks.