Milwaukee HDTV User Group

In the end this is just a horrible area when it comes to Internet Service Providers. We have nothing close to what other parts of the country have. Fiber to the Home? Hahahahahaha. Not for a couple of decades at least! 1Gbps service? Yeah, that costs about $5000 a month and you have to be a certain kind of "business subscriber" to get it.

If this is the "future" of television news like they think it is, we're all doomed.

Two of the executives were fired from Tribune Broadcasting for royally screwing up the place. Lee Abrams is a former radio executive who was brought in under former Tribune CEO and OWI recipient Randy Michaels. He thought it was A good idea to can a news department in Houston and replaced it with something like "TouchVision" called "NewsFix" that they thought they could replace traditional news on ALL their stations with. A national version eventually made it to the few Tribune stations with no news, but the idea doesn't seem to be taking off... He later resigned after sending an "inappropriate email"

Bill Carey was the News Director at Tribune's New York City station WPIX. A few years ago he bought into this "younger viewer" thing and decided to radically reformat their news broadcasts. There was no easing into the changes, one day they just went from a tradional format to the "hip" format that was done from a corner of the newsroom. Social Media and pointless commentary ruled the shows. Ratings plummeted and remain some of the worst in the market. He got canned and the new NF struggles to clean up the mess he made.

But this... This will go places!

There's a mall across the street from Tribune Tower in Chicago that has a loop like this running on monitors in the food court. I almost wonder if that's where they got the idea.

So is this channel going to do anything more than be Useless Weather Subchannel #3?

You know, if this is all it's going to do we should all pitch in and buy the thing and make it useful.

Quote from: tencom;58728Today 7/27 saw the arrival Of WMLW-HD on air using RF channel 24 still in the  480I Mode.  The signal strength indicates full power. Lo- power 13-1 WMLW's old digital channel no longer appears, at least at my location. Let's all Hope that channel CBS 58, can increase their data rate from a miserable 9 to 10 Megabit per second, to a full HDTV data rate,of 19.2 megabits per second,  with channel 41 "58-2"moving to  it's own channel resulting in a higher quality HDTV video for channel 58.

I'm sure we'll still have to suffer with Shorewest TV on 58's digital signal.

Quote from: mrschimpf;58718Lost in the fun that was the Hearst/Time Warner catfight was that Weigel is doing the last of their changes to put both WMLW and WYTU in HD. According to Dudek in the Journal-Sentinel, WMLW and WBME will switch around channels on August 7. I don't know exactly how (it's not explained in the article and a better explanation hasn't come in a comment where I asked for more info), but I'm assuming parsing the text that WMLW will go to 49.1 in HD, while the Me-TV schedule will go to digital 13 and 58.2 in SD, and now we'll get WMLW-TV 49 and WBME-CD/CA 41.

Meanwhile WYTU launches by next week in HD on their LP digital 17 (mapping to 63.1) in time for the Olympics and their soccer coverage, along with the Packers pre-season in Espanol (which is the first I've heard of that), at least according to 58 on their newscast tonight. Don't know anything yet about cable coverage of WYTU in HD though, or if 49.4 will remain Telemundo.

And I'm just assuming WMLW-CA and WYTU-LP will continue to carry WMLW's schedule and MeTV until the transmitters finally conk out on those analog dinosaurs.

It took them this long to realize Me-TV didn't need a full power digital channel? :rolleyes:

Bonus "bad" points to WISN for not bothering to line the thing up with the bugs.

Just slap it on anywhere.

There is no "right" or "wrong" in regards to carriage agreement negotiations. It's too companies looking to profit from whatever they can.

These agreements are going to continue to be an issue until the government decides to regulate television distribution companies, which at this rate will be never.

If you want to live in a world without carriage agreements, move to Canada, where I understand cable companies are required to carry local broadcast stations, and they also must operate a "community channel" (similar to our public access channels) paid for by the profit from operating the system, instead of adding it as a charge to subscribers bills, then eliminating that charge and these station's funding and basically telling them to buzz off.

Quote from: LoadStar;58537Cool news! I bet it'll be nice to get out of that old building.

Not that I think the Milwaukee area could sustain another newscast, but will there be space set aside for studios... you know... just in case?

If they're using the whole building there should probably be enough space for something resembling a studio, though they'd be limited by the height of the building's ceiling (no giant sets, would have to be something like the last WNBC set).

Milwaukee may be able to sustain another newscast, but is it worth the hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of dollars to get an operation set up when they'll "really" only be competing against a station with a rapidly deteriorating news product and another that promotes anything involving the number 10? Let's face it, Sinclair didn't bother to let the last operation get very far before they yanked it.

And the first few minutes of tonight's news was full of technical errors with graphics appearing on screen at the wrong time and then not appearing when they were supposed to.

:bang:

Quote from: trev57;58333Well it looks like HD does in fact affect ratings. CBS 58 beat FOX 6 in the February sweeps with 6.7 rating over 6's 5.9 rating.

http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/entertainment/141044203.html

I think it's a mix of both WDJT's improved quality and overall look, and a plunge in the quality of content on WITI. "One man band" packages full of editing mistakes (i.e. interviewees not miced up) done by people who look like they just got out of or are still in college, people constantly coming and going, constant production errors (And they're not even automated yet), a poorly managed graphics package mixed with stock graphics bought off the internet, and a promotions department that just produces bland content.

Even this tornado relief ticker they're running looks like it was thrown together 10 minutes before the fundraiser started. It's full of glitches.

It may not be a huge part of ratings, but is it any wonder that the two stations who have consistent use of graphics and music are the two that are in the lead?

Those promos are produced by the WIAA, if I recall correctly. The stations just slap on their own logo.

Quote from: mrschimpf;58260"On Your Side" is by far the most generic news branding out there these days. Almost all of Media General's dull news operations with the same logos and same sets use it as their main branding, along with several other station chains. It started with consumer news segments and should stay there.

As for the music? It doesn't scream urgency at all and sounds like something out of an infomercial. It also sounds like it has the CBS three-note theme in it, something you really don't want from an NBC station.

The fact that they've slapped "ON YOUR SIDE" onto everything is grounds for an instant "dislike" in my opinion. "Breaking News Now On Your Side"? What? Seriously?

For music, I think they should have gone with Aerial over Locals Only for music. KTNV, Journal's station in Vegas uses that and it works real nice with the graphics. I don't think I can say the same about Locals Only. They've also not dropped their habit of using the same track for everything, so everything about this change has gotten repetitive real fast. It's only been a day and I'm already tired of hearing "On Your Side" every two minutes.

It's just not winter unless there's something on the screen telling us that "Hairstyles by Maude" is closed and and Friday Night Bingo is canceled.

There are some big changes this year! New tickers on WTMJ and WDJT, and an updated one on WITI.

WTMJ's ticker is now in HD, and doesn't squish the video anymore. It also no longer has it's own logo so there's not 3 "Today's TMJ4" logos on the screen.



Before:


WITI cleaned theirs up, made it smaller, making the inset video larger and allowing the ticker to overlap it slightly.



Before:


WDJT has switched to their new HD ticker. The only issue is the map seems to have been pushed out of SD safe areas just so they could slap on a sponsor logo.



WISN has made no changes and everything works the same way as last year.


Will they continue to alert us to the bingo cancellations during primetime? We'll see...

I used to watch WITI frequently (as my username implies) but in the past two years or so I've almost stopped watching alltogether. Their overall presentation is in need of a serious overhaul. There's been some slight improvements lately, but they really need to get rid of their stock DigitalJuice background graphics and replace those horrendous things they call "news opens". The promotions department needs to be replaced as well, A lot of the stuff they use are default Final Cut Pro effects.

And that set needs to go. Now.

As for content, they've been mediocre for the past few years. Ever since the sale to Local TV (though I doubt staying a FOX O&O would have been much better.) theres an obvious lack of money and hiring "videojournalists" and what appear to be people fresh out of college. Breaking news is painful to watch ever since they lost their helicopter. That day two summers ago when the panel fell off that parking garage, there were something like 40 minutes of cell phone pictures narrated by people on cell phones and crappy cell phone streams that broke up before they could get a live truck set up. The other stations had their helicopters up and you could actually see things. Similar thing happened with the power plant bluff collapse a few weeks ago. At the very least they need to enter into a sharing agreement with WTMJ or WISN, if either of them would do such a thing.

WTMJ: I'll usually watch WTMJ when I watch news. I think they have the best production values in the market. Content-wise, I think they could probably scale back the weather coverage quite a bit and there'd probably still be too much. Speaking of weather, I might just be picky here, but their weather graphics are awful. Using Accuweather's awful maps just screams "lazy" to me. The graphics on the VIPIR system are all still the default.

Their graphics are getting kind of stale, and are probably due for a refresh, but considering some of Journal's other stations have only recently adopted this package, It'll probably be a few years until that happens. Their set is also getting kind of old, too.

WISN: Content: Great. Presentation: Ugh. The Hothaus Creative graphics (i.e. the open) are great, the Hearst graphics look bad next to them. They also suffer from a bad case of templateitis, where everything looks the same. Production values seem to have fallen pretty low, I'm shocked that they're still frequently airing packages in SD, and that some graphics still appear to be in SD.

Their set is meh. It needed to be totally replaced, they squeezed a few (key word: few) more years of life out of it with the recent refresh (which was poorly done itself).

WDJT: Content: Ugh. Presentation: Great. The new set, while small, is a huge improvement over the newsroom. Graphics are, in my opinion, right underneath WTMJ. Unfortunately, the HD upgrade and automation has severely degraded their already low production values. Their "style" of having the other anchor start talking the moment the other stops is very hard to do with automation and requires the TD to advance the rundown immediately when one stops talking or risk clipping the other.

And "Just 10 Minutes" needs to go. Now.

Quote from: SRW1000;58231WISN is not the only local channel to brand their SD field shots as HD.

Unfortunately, not many viewers notice.

I can understand the live shot thing, but even the lower third graphics appear to be in SD. Compare this screenshot from WDJT. Same exact resolution and WDJT looks much better (especially the graphics), even with it's numerous subchannels.