Nope, it’s not because you lose the signal. It’s because the local television stations have failed to upgrade a critical piece of equipment in their signal path: the inserter. An inserter is the thing that allows TV stations to put their logo (“bug”) and little severe-weather map in the corner of your screen, and put a text crawl at the bottom of the screen. If the inserter isn’t upgraded to high-definition, guess what? Whenever they use it, it downgrades the picture to standard-definition.
Right now, there’s a severe thunderstorm watch for several counties in the area. So the evening news on channel 19 (which includes several tributes to Michael Jackson) is in standard definition. Any other programs that are on during the watch will also be downgraded. And it’s not just channel 19. I haven’t checked lately, but not long ago when I was watching David Letterman, the opening would pop down to standard def while the channel 31 logo appeared on the screen, then pop back up to high def when the bug disappeared.
My guess is that the TV engineers would really like to get one of these little babies, but the bean counters at corporate aren’t willing to shell out the bucks for it (they can run upwards of $8,000 — not an unusual price for broadcast equipment). So, all the benefits of the government-mandated conversion to HDTV go in the toilet whenever the station puts its logo on screen.
Hey, local TV stations: Buy an HD inserter already. Are you trying to drive your few remaining viewers away?
And how many viewers are calling their TV manufacturers to complain? Most of them, I bet.
And it happens on WEEK, too.
You know. The station that used the year-long lead-up to DTV to rake in money ad revenue, and then ran deceptive and often flat-out wrong “consumer” reporting on the change.
I absolutely guarantee they make more than enough cash from that to pay for the inserter.
I have to say, while there are plenty of more important things to complain about, that is a big pet peeve of mine.
Just turn off the tube. Tune into life.
. . . said the anonymous blogger who spends no small amount of time online. 😉
Hey, have you seen this news article?
New details about Michael Jackson’s Death Emerge
I was wondering if you were going to blog about this…
I was not aware that peorias stations owned the cameras needed to even do the news in high def? I thought about al they could do was pass the network feed in HD
Peoria Dad — I don’t believe they do have the cameras to do the news in HD. But they do have the equipment to pass HD signals to the viewers (HD receiver, HD transmitter, and HD video server so they can timeshift programming such as the ABC evening news). They need to get one more piece of equipment — the HD inserter — so they don’t have to downgrade their picture every time they put a screen crawl, bug, or weather alert on screen. I’m talking about when it is superimposed over network programming, not during the local news broadcast.
http://www.weather.com ??
I don’t even bother with a TV during storms.