15 Houston Now Has 10 Sub Channels Wow

[DJboutit3]

15 now has 10 sub channels I thought the max allowed by the FCC was 8 and even that is to many 4 should be max. The more sub channels you have the worse the picture quality is on each sub channel I can not see how any of the 10 sub channels picture quality is even watchable.

 

[purpledevil]

Just noticed they were lit up on Monday. KVVV 15.2 has also acquired UTN sometime around the first, leaving KHLM 43.8 to simulcast 43.4, which are now both wall to wall infomercials.

 

[dougw9wi]

15 now has 10 sub channels I thought the max allowed by the FCC was 8 and even that is to many 4 should be max. The more sub channels you have the worse the picture quality is on each sub channel I can not see how any of the 10 sub channels picture quality is even watchable.

There is no FCC limit on how many subchannels a DTV station may have. There's also no hard-and-fast limit in the ATSC standard.

Of course, as you say, the more subchannels you have the poorer the picture quality.

There's a station in Atlanta running ten TV subchannels and another ten audio-only programs. One in San Francisco has *twelve* TV subs and eight audio-onlys.

 

[JHBrandt]

There is a theoretical limit: 99 (!) subchannels, but unless all of them were audio-only nobody would be stupid enough to try it. KWDA in the DFW area has 9 subchannels, and the picture quality on several suffers noticeably.

A rule of thumb I use is, no more than seven SD subchannels, or one HD plus three SD, unless some of them are very low-bandwidth. Even then you'd need a good statmux to keep the picture quality reasonable.

 

[JHBrandt]

I should add that subchannel numbers over 100 are possible, but can't be received by most consumer equipment. At one time Ion used subchannel numbers > 100
for their encrypted Airbox channels, but changed back to 2-digit channel numbers due to incompatibilities with some receivers.