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Tyler KETK-DT blows first Sunday night game

G

gbranch

In typical KETK fashion, their HD goes down right before the Sunday night Cowboys-Giants game. The pregame started in HD, but with no center dialog channel in their 5.1 stream. They switched to SD for a while, then right before the game started both 56.1 and 56.2, NBC Weatherplus went dark. It did not appear to be a transmitter problem as I was still getting a strong signal. They were just black screen. They had this problem all last season. Figured they would have gotten this worked out by now. Looks like another long season for Football Night America in HD on KETK-DT.

And, in a related incident, KFXK-DT forgets to switch out of SD after a commercial during the first half of the Bears-Chargers game. They stayed SD the rest of the game.

These weren't network problems as the Shreveport NBC and FOX affiliates, KTAL and KMSS, had no problems providing their games in HD.

Question to the station operators who frequent this board - How hard is it to keep HD on the air? It doesn't seem like it is rocket science, but maybe I don't understand the inner workings of an HD facility. I know that this is new technology, but some of the Tyler stations seem to be way behind the curve when it comes to HD. Thank goodness we still have the analog channels to fall back on, but that all ends in Feb 2009. Hope these stations get their issues worked out before then.
 
Greg Branch said:
Question to the station operators who frequent this board - How hard is it to keep HD on the air?
Click to expand...

It's not. You just have to have staffers who know what the hell they are doing, and are paying attention to what's going on. Unfortunately in small markets, you often have minimum wage types who see it as another McJob.
 
No, it's not any harder than riding the board for the old stations. I also wondered if KETK bailed out on the postgame coverage of the Sunday Night Game to go straight to news. I thought network was pitching to the postgame after a break, but following the national commercials, the peacock "screensaver" screen popped up for a while and then they rolled the news open. Either they missed their cue for the end of the broadcast, or they missed a local break and bailed out on the postgame.

What up, Branch? Good to see you still hanging out here, amigo.
 
I work for a duopoly, and one of the networks is automatically programmed to switch (in other words, the network does the work for us). In the event that it fails, we reset our digital splicer. The other network, we have to program the network times in manually. I haven't had to switch any live HD programming off that network yet, but we have an HD router in which we can hot punch it, if needed.

Someone else hit it right on the head though, they just pay so low these days, that most of the operators are entry level with no TV experience. I'm sure KETK had a lot of money riding on the Cowboys game. I'd think that they would have one of their better operators there to switch it, even if it was a Sunday night. Oh well. You get what you pay for.
 
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