CBS Sunday night schedule differences - DTV vs Analog

[Paul Bethke]

In an interesting turn of events, the CBS feeds of Sunday night programming differed between the DTV and Analog stations.

My wife wanted to watch the "Christmas Shoes" movie, but was disappointed to find that Analog CBS (both 58-Milwaukee and 3-Madison) were delayed, presumably by afternoon football.

Interestingly enough, when I checked CBS DTV (both 58-1 and 3-1) they were adhering to the proper time schedule.

Does anybody know where and why the scheduling diverged? Why didn't the DTV channels get delayed as well?

I'm guessing that the local stations took care of the delay, but both 58 and 3 analog were almost identically synchronized, as if it were a network feed.

I was curious to see how they were going to resolve the programming differences, so I watched the end on 58-1 at 10PM. FYI - the HD movie ended, followed by a minute or two of blackness, then an up-converted feed of the analog 58 was joined, showing the 2nd half of the movie again.

Cheers...Paul

[ReesR]

Paul:

I believe Ch58 had a wonderful opportunity to promote their digital feed by disclosing that the program would be showed on time.  But experience has shown they just want to do it "their" way.

They could have taped the 10pm news for later analog broadcast while the 10pm news was aired on digital.  Then broadcast something else (like HD Net) until it was time to syncronize digital with analog.

I wonder what CBS would say if they found out they were doing this to their programming?  Would they be pleased to hear how they joined the analog feed and repeated it? Hmmmm.

It only shows a continued pattern in my opinion.

------------------
Rees Roberts
Racine, WI
reesr@wi.net

HDTV Receiver:  Sony KD-34XBR2 16X9
Bi-directional AntennaCraft VHF Yagi Model #2260P
+
2 Winegard PR9022 UHF yagi's pointing N & S
Antennas at about 30 feet
Samsung SIR-TS160 HD Directv receiver

[wxndave]

Rees, I would have to disagree with you.  CBS is the one at fault here not the local stations.  They aired what CBS provided them on their HD feed.  What should have happend is the local station should have stayed with their upconverted signal to match the analog.  However you would have probably complained that they should have shown the HD feed.

I don't understand how this was a wonderful opportunity for them to promote their digital feed.  If I was a analog TV viewer I probably wouldn't understand what was going on.  If I'm watching it on analog, I probably don't care because I don't have a Digital TV.  What everyone on this forum seems to forget, we are the minority.  Stations need to maintain there current viewers.

 

[Paul Bethke]

For clarification, the "Christmas Shoes" movie *was* in HD. So the showing from 8PM-10PM was an actual HD movie.

At 10PM, 58-1 switched to an up-convert (with side bars) of the analog station's delayed movie, while 3-1 (Madison) showed a stretched (SD?) transmission of the Analog.

I was mostly wondering what happened when the scheduling diverged. Like, if it was a football game, did CBS-DT just switch to their proscribed schedule - forcing the viewers to go watch Analog for the end of the game?

Likewise, I wanted to see if at 10PM they would do the news on 58-1, as Rees suggested.

The fun of pioneering!  

[JimHall]

The reason that the CBS HD feed was not in-sync with the analog feed was due to the football over-run.  The CBS network only provides one feed for HD and will always operate the HD feed on time.  We could have elected to not show the HD feed and aired to an up coverted signal, but that would not have satisfied viewers with HD sets.  Additionally, when we are out of sync between analog and HD, we cannot air our local commercial breaks, however, we elected to provide HD programming to the market instead.   At the end of the HD feed, we were not cleared for the HDNet programming, (not all HDNet programming is cleared for broadcast) and it was not feasible to air a special 10pm news on just the DTV channel.  

Thus, until CBS provides all the time zones in the country with a time-shifted HD feed due to football over-runs, this will happen from time-to-time.

[Gregg Lengling]

Thanks for putting this to bed Jim, always nice to have you around to handle the hard questions...keep up the good work.

[Paul Bethke]

Thank you Jim!

This was more of a curiosity than anything else. Now we have the "inside" story. Much appreciated.

You know full well that we will take as much HD programming as we can get our hands on.

Best...Paul