Milwaukee HDTV User Group

This is what you need if you don't have a TiVo. Got one about 7 years ago when digital TV really picked up.

Not a troll. Just a sports fan that got tired of the delay.

http://www.sportsyncradio.com/

I love the smell of new studio in the morning!

We hear Hearst is in this for the long haul. Of course you never know if that is just posturing or not.

But now Nexstar, who owns WBRE, is complaining that TWC has no right to put their stations signal on in other markets without their permission. TWC is basically telling them to go pound sand. That will be the real interesting side story in all this. It is getting out of hand really quickly now.

In my market here in NC, the Hearst station has been replaced with WBRE, Wilkes-Barrie, PA. The Hearst stations ratings haven't dropped that much considering that TWC has about a 60% share of the cable here. If this continues, TWC will be the loser since the pull hasn't really effected the Hearst stations here. Hearst could go a long time here.

Quote from: jimboy;58538haven't seen the final remodel plans yet.
In the future....the studio is wherever the camera is..........

+1        !

Quote from: WITI6fan;57636Here you can see their control room still has the ancient GVG-200 in use.

Holy crap! We got rid of our 200 over 10 years ago and we only used ours in commercial production! We used a 300 for on air shows!

I can tell you that your larger station groups have LARGE pipes going in and out of stations. Our groups Intranet runs in the gigabit range. We have the capability to dip into sister stations server systems and pull news stories IN HD directly over the Intranet never getting out on to the public Internet at speeds that are blinding and quite expensive too! I can be at my desk at work here in North Carolina and watch in real time EVERY news story FOX6 runs today over the group Intranet connection. I can also watch any newscast they have done in the last week in real time over the Intranet as well. Not in HD, but much better quality than your average public Internet connection. They can do the same to my station. As a matter of fact, our group has an IP based video network that we can dial up at will and get real time video from a sister station, IN HD. It takes a VERY large pipe to do all that. It isn't unique to us. Many station groups do it now. It is just part of doing business. The FOX O & O's and us former O & O's use a point to point system FOX owns that is all fiber based in HD for real time news delivery within that sphere. So yeah, I may have a unique viewpoint to file distribution between stations.

And yeah, some commercial clients don't mind you taking a spot off the Internet to run on air. They look like hell, but it saves the client the "delivery charge" a content distributor like PathFire or PitchBlue or DGFastChannel would charge. To them, it is all the same.

FOX6 is a sister station and we have a lot of the same equipment and it is nice to see how others are using it from the viewers perspective. Pick up some neat ideas every now and again.

Quote from: Xizer;57478It takes me 15 minutes to download a 5-7 GB file on my home connection. A major business like a TV station can't match what I get in my basement? Uhh? :confused:

Also, I hate to break it to you, but you don't seem to understand what is and isn't compressed video.

If I were you, I would be very careful lecturing to me since you really don't know what I know.

QuoteBut I doubt any broadcaster has the competence to handle lossless video, so everything they are working with is undoubtedly heavily compressed with lossy codecs.

You just proved my point. You have no clue.

Good Bye.

You are pulling terabytes of files that are highly compressed and you are not on a deadline. That is the difference.

The files they are talking about are usually non compressed files for best quality. MPEG4 is not the standard yet in the broadcasting industry, but it is moving in that direction. Majority of the servers in use only do MPEG2. A none compressed HD 30 minute program averages around 5-7 Gigabits in size. Without a FAIRLY LARGE pipe, it takes hours to download that. Some services use satellite, some use the Internet to push product. It all takes time if you want the quality from stations you say you do.

The consumer world and the broadcast world are two completely different worlds on this.

I can't speak for the Milwaukee area, not living there, but from my own perspective, it isn't so much INCREASING ratings, but MAINTAINING what you have.

If the viewer perceives the station as not keeping up with the technology, they will assume that their news product suffers in other areas as well. It is a subconscious thing, but it eventual starts to erode ratings, no matter how good or bad the content is.

I myself are content driven, not HD driven. But now with all the HD choices available to me locally as well as nationally in my market, the SD newscast is overlooked as if it were a black and white program. I choose between the HD programs and the SD programs only come in to view if no HD program is deemed worthy of my eyes. How many times have you been watching a classic TV show and said to yourself, "this is really good, but if it were in color/16:9..." We all do this. As the new manta goes, "We are born this way." It is subconsciously considered inferior, no matter how good content wise it is. And the old shows in black and white content wise are a heck of a lot better than what is coming out today content wise!

If the norm in a given market is opposite of what you are doing, eventually what you are doing dies. Perceived better is available somewhere else. And as we all know, perception is reality. I see this thinking exhibited on this very board by many posters when discussing SD vs HD now.

Something to think about.

Some people I know at the Hearst station in my market is telling me that Hearst is in no hurry to go HD. Their big push is the net. They are spending like crazy on all kinds of streaming equipment so they can be anywhere, anytime, and go on live with just a 3G phone. They feel that is the future, not HD.

The Hearst station in my market is making no moves toward HD at all. They did go 16:9 last year, the last one in the market. 6 months later we went HD having been 16:9 SD for a full year beating the other stations by months.

Quote from: ArgMeMatey;56792As I understand it the local stations may choose Must Carry or Retransmission Consent.  

In other words, broadcasters can demand carriage, or they can demand money, but not both.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must-carry

You are correct.

My guess is if this goes any distance, it will be hung up in the courts for years. If the Dem's loose the White House in 2012, ole' Gen' is gone and this all goes away.

Quote from: WITI6fan;56641If I understand how the splicer system works, in order to overlay something, don't they have to cut back to "local" mode to do stuff like this? If that's correct, then wouldn't it just be their local audio equipment at fault?

FOX only provides stereo L/R to the "studio feed" to all stations. Not 5.1. The 5.1 is created at the network MC in LA, not at the stations.