Are we shooting ourselves in the (DTV) foot?

[tripinva]

MotoMuzak: It was announced to be on a Meredith-owned station, which means KPTV or KPDX.

Is KPDX doing MyNet in HD? I know co-owned KSMO in Kansas City is just upconverting everything to HD with sidebars, showing no MyNet HD. My guess would be that Dot2 will end up there in HD, with MyNet ending up in SD. If KPDX isn't showing MyNet in HD, I could see that happen in Portland as well.

- Trip

 

[imhomerjay]

I hate to complicate matters further, but I can tell you that generally speaking the broadcasters are not getting paid for their signals at all.
That is not to say it never happens or that they're paying to get on cable either. There have been several instances in the past couple of years where a station or station group demanded money, the cable system said no, and the channels left cable for a time. The public was caught in a tug of war between the two. In one case in Abilene, Texas, the station was off cable for several months. After the ratings book came in a deal was reached pretty quick.

Totally accurate. Remember, the ultimate decision in whether or not a broadcast signal is carred by the cable company belongs to the broadcaster. Invoking must-carry would put a stop to any attempt to force a broadcaster to pay a cable company to carry them.

Yes, that would mean giving up retransmission consent considerations that broadcaster might be able to extract, but even in that case, the idea that the cable company could somehow force cash out of the hands of the broadcaster is highly unlikely.

 

[Morgan Wick]

Quick point of clarification, slightly changing the subject. Will broadcasters be required, by rule, to have two feeds for any content they show in HD, one of them in SD? I know that's the case de facto, because otherwise it really would be requiring people to get HD sets, but...

(I will write a series of blog posts in August, six months before the transition, with my thoughts on this and other issues)

 

[zman]

Quick point of clarification, slightly changing the subject. Will broadcasters be required, by rule, to have two feeds for any content they show in HD, one of them in SD? I know that's the case de facto, because otherwise it really would be requiring people to get HD sets, but...

(I will write a series of blog posts in August, six months before the transition, with my thoughts on this and other issues)

Broadcasters are not being required to broadcast in HD. They are being required to broadcast a digital signal. While all HD is digital not all digital is HD. That part seems to confuse many people.

 

[tripinva]

Quick point of clarification, slightly changing the subject. Will broadcasters be required, by rule, to have two feeds for any content they show in HD, one of them in SD? I know that's the case de facto, because otherwise it really would be requiring people to get HD sets, but...

(I will write a series of blog posts in August, six months before the transition, with my thoughts on this and other issues)

All digital boxes downconvert the HD into SD, so there's no need for an SD simulcast.

- Trip

 

[Morgan Wick]

Quick point of clarification, slightly changing the subject. Will broadcasters be required, by rule, to have two feeds for any content they show in HD, one of them in SD? I know that's the case de facto, because otherwise it really would be requiring people to get HD sets, but...

(I will write a series of blog posts in August, six months before the transition, with my thoughts on this and other issues)

Broadcasters are not being required to broadcast in HD. They are being required to broadcast a digital signal. While all HD is digital not all digital is HD. That part seems to confuse many people.

That hits the nail on the head as to why what seems simple to people who are intimately familiar with it seems incredibly complicated to others (and I was in fact planning on using a variant of your third sentence in one of my aforementioned forthcoming blog posts), but I'm in the former group, not the latter. I know I didn't phrase it very well, but I figure "any content [that] they show in HD" would imply the question didn't apply to content not in HD. Not to mention the idea of a feed in SD implies that "broadcasters are not being required to broadcast in HD", not to mention "otherwise it really would be requiring people to get HD sets" would seem to imply it's not.

I did not expect to get the reply in the post directly below yours at all, though...

 

[Morgan Wick]

Quick point of clarification, slightly changing the subject. Will broadcasters be required, by rule, to have two feeds for any content they show in HD, one of them in SD? I know that's the case de facto, because otherwise it really would be requiring people to get HD sets, but...

(I will write a series of blog posts in August, six months before the transition, with my thoughts on this and other issues)

All digital boxes downconvert the HD into SD, so there's no need for an SD simulcast.

- Trip

I hate to bump this thread from the dead after being dormant for two whole months (and I've linked to it from a blog post here so it might be bumped anyway), but I'd like to see if I can get independent confirmation of this, which seemed incredible to me at the time and I'm still having to wrap my head around it now. For one thing, I get Comcast Digital Cable in SD, and I can't watch the HD channels - they always appear as a black screen with background sound playing. Does "digital boxes" only apply to digital TVs and DTV converters? If not, could my cable company shake up my channel lineup to get rid of SD-only channels after 2009? Is it really true that the only reason a station would provide any sort of SD feed at all is for the benefit of cable providers? Could we see stations and networks optimize their graphics after 2009 with HD in mind? What about kenglish on the DTV misconceptions thread claiming "everyone has to broadcast one SD feed, no one HAS to go HD"? Do they have to broadcast an SD feed even if they do go HD? So many questions...

 

[tripinva]

I hate to bump this thread from the dead after being dormant for two whole months (and I've linked to it from a blog post here so it might be bumped anyway), but I'd like to see if I can get independent confirmation of this, which seemed incredible to me at the time and I'm still having to wrap my head around it now. For one thing, I get Comcast Digital Cable in SD, and I can't watch the HD channels - they always appear as a black screen with background sound playing. Does "digital boxes" only apply to digital TVs and DTV converters? If not, could my cable company shake up my channel lineup to get rid of SD-only channels after 2009? Is it really true that the only reason a station would provide any sort of SD feed at all is for the benefit of cable providers? Could we see stations and networks optimize their graphics after 2009 with HD in mind? What about kenglish on the DTV misconceptions thread claiming "everyone has to broadcast one SD feed, no one HAS to go HD"? Do they have to broadcast an SD feed even if they do go HD? So many questions...

I can't speak for cable boxes; they probably don't. I was referring to the CECBs only, they downconvert the HD into SD.

The FCC only requires stations to have a single, unscrambled, SD feed as a bare minimum. If they wish to do HD, they don't have to be SD, since HD is better than SD. If they wish to scramble the rest of their feed, they can do that, as long as there's that one single in-the-clear SD feed.

- Trip

 

[softmachine]

But, that's if you have the Cable company's rented converter box, a (hard to find) ATSC+QAM converter, or a set with ATSC+QAM tuner. If they have NONE of the above, why do we tell them they're "Jist Fine" with their old, analog Cable? (The subsidized converters won't decode QAM cable channels).

What type of cable does my DigitalStream DTX9950 decode? It has the selection for cable input.