Say goodbye to TheCoolTV, hello to Live Well Network

[mrschimpf]

This is a pretty sad one; Journal sued TheCoolTV for $257k for "non-payment of broadcast operations" (sounds like something involving satellite reception, ad payments and the like), so Journal is done with them and on October 1st, 4.3 becomes another affiliate of the Live Well Network. WGBA in Green Bay is getting MeTV to replace them on 26.2.

Because of TMJ's ridiculous policy of keeping their subchannels exclusive to Time Warner and not doing anything at all with Charter I only can see TheCoolTV on antenna, so I never really saw it that much, but I never had any complaints about it at all. I really hope Cool is able to survive if they're having problems with cash flow, and hopefully because Sinclair airs it in every market WCGV is quick to pick them right back up.

As for Live Well...I already have HGTV, and Live Well is no HGTV :rolleyes:. Pray that WTMJ doesn't pull a WLS and throws their signal on in 720p. It's seriously not needed.

[WITI6fan]

Pray that WTMJ doesn't pull a WLS and throws their signal on in 720p. It's seriously not needed.

I am told that they will not.

[LoadStar]

I would have rather seen them pick up Universal Sports than Live Well.

Odd that they picked up an ABC Disney network over an NBC Universal network.

[SRW1000]

Well, the good news is that Live Well won't be showing up as an HD subchannel on WISN.

WTMJ's HD is so poor already due to the current subs, losing Cool and adding Live Well won't have much impact.

[mrschimpf]

I would have rather seen them pick up Universal Sports than Live Well.

Odd that they picked up an ABC Disney network over an NBC Universal network.

Actually Universal Sports is out as a subchannel option; they just announced they're going cable only, which is probably why they had to go with Live Well. The only other options that weren't taken were probably Spanish-language subchannels like Mexicanal or LATV since most of the subchannel affiliations are already taken in the market (Mexicanal airs on their Tucson and Vegas sister stations), and there's no way they would've taken RTV at all.

[PONIES]

This is fantastic news! This means WISN won't be getting that damn Live Well subchannel and will be able to maintain its full bitrate. WTMJ's bitrate is already crap so swapping out subchannels won't have much of an impact.

I'm glad Universal Sports is going cable-only too as this will allow them to launch a HD feed and quit leeching off every NBC affiliate in the country.

For the longest time I've been worrying about Disney forcing that stupid Live Well channel on WISN and ruining their awesome bitrate. I think they're the last full bitrate ABC affiliate in the country. All around this has been a surprisingly good year for HDTV.

[mrschimpf]

The OK news; Live Well is thankfully in 480i widescreen, so the people excited for the network should be happy they don't have parts of the screen cut off or letterboxed.

But now it looks like the main signal has gotten reduced a little in PQ, even on cable. Lovely, huh :bang:? They would've been better off putting on FirstWeberGroupTV than this monotonous lineup that repeats four times a day.

[PONIES]

Well, WTMJ's video bitrate now seems to be no higher than 12.5 Mbps at any given time. A lot of the time, the two subchannels consume ~3.5 Mbps of bandwidth. Each. For MPEG-2, this bitrate is horrendous. All fine detail has been lost; the channel is more blocky and smudgier/blurry than ever. They appear to be allocating slightly more bandwidth to the main HD feed off of Live Well during slower scenes; but the difference is slight. 11 Mbps is the bitrate with rare peaks up no higher than 12.5. This is further exacerbated by the fact that WTMJ's MPEG-2 encoder seems to be worse than WMAQ's (Chicago's much bigger O&O NBC affiliate). I do not know what exact equipment both channels use but I have no doubt that WTMJ's is inferior.

It is really a shame to see NBC's master feed gradually degraded in this manner. The main NBC East feed is distributed to affiliates with at least 15 Mbps H.264 bitrate; that's the equivalent of MPEG-2 @ 30 Mbps. If you live somewhere where you can put up a satellite dish in order to receive this feed, I would highly recommend it. The way these OTA/cable affiliates over-compress this beautiful feed is disgusting.

Here is Milwaukee's NBC affiliate now:



Here's Chicago's:



If you want to see what a PROPER affiliate's bitrates should look like, have a look at WISN and WVTV's:





Milwaukee has two of the best looking affiliates in the country still - ABC and The CW.

Naturally, those god damn subchannels are salivating at the thought of leeching off of those two.

I really think we dodged a bullet here. Look what Live Well has turned Chicago's ABC affiliate into:



It's... it's... horrifying.