sdwulfdawg said:
I was watching "Batman and Robin" this morning on Starz and every almost like ever 90 seconds there was a slight but very noticeable 3 second wow/flutter in the audio, almost as though it was on a badly wound tape....reminded me of the old days of TV yore with two inch and later one inch tapes. I was also surprised that the warble lasted almost till the end of the movie, and the rest of the programming on the network seemed to have OK audio.
Don't the cable networks have their programming (like movies) digitized and do playback off of hard drives? Aren't all of the networks running their shows by automation? (You always hear on Fox News Channel the host telling the guests they were coming up onto a "hard" break.)
Where do the cable networks generally have their master controls? Who does it for them?
Just curious.
Starz/Encore NOC out is out of somewhere in Colorado. Palladia, the MTV HD network, is somewhere nearby, as is the Comcast Media Center (E!, Style, G4, Versus). The high elevation must have something to do with it. I believe Dish Network's recieving station is also in the area (Directv's is in the California desert close to Los Angeles).
Other known NOC locations: Atlanta for the Turner networks and The Weather Channel. Washington for C-SPAN, Discovery Networks, TV One, BET Networks. Knoxville, TN for the Scripps Channels (HGTV, Food Network, Great American Country). QVC in West Chester, PA. HSN near Tampa, FL. ESPN networks out of Bristol, CT. Most of everybody else is either in New York (including the NBC Universal and Cablevision [AMC, Fuse, We] networks, as well as HBO) or Los Angeles. I don't know how the regional Fox Sports networks are configured.
A "hard" break is where the master control computer takes over the feed and goes to commercial. This has nothing to do with video playback formats. I suspect this is to accomditate local ad-insertions (although they can and do override this capability during breaking news events).
Given the amount of video that has to be ingested into hard drives and the time it takes, it may make since for certain networks to stick with tape (for now). Given how many times a movie has to be played back over a month, it would make since for the premium networks to use hard drive technology.
Given how much that a person pays per month for premium channels (Starz is the least expensive, HBO is the most), it might not hurt to contact the cable company and the network directly. You might get a couple of bucks off the bill in return.
