Why the hell is WISN/ABC 1080i now?

[foxeng]

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.

[mrschimpf]

Thank you for your insights, Foxeng, especially going deeper into the article, which I did read before posting the link and knowing there are certain standards that have to be met to have a commercial locally on television these days.

I download completely different video formats everyday for my podcasts (MP4 in its multiple iterations, WMV, FLV among them) and I know that they look fine on the computer, but once you get to a broadcast television station you have to have standards and uncompressed video. What seems OK on blip.tv with a web series in most cases (some producers have it together, some are limited by their equipment) would look pretty darn awful on regular television.

For instance on local TV there's the Cardinal Stritch ad that airs occasionally which seems to be ripped right off of Youtube or submitted as a converted FLV and is just awful to watch and hear. That's why there has to be standards and you have to submit videos in the formats the stations want. Also, a television station's bandwidth bill? I'm sure that you combine commercial, network promos and some programs that upload their shows to the web in a month and you'll blow through every plan every ISP offers locally and have to have a unique plan, plus I'm sure you're downloading those files all at once at times so you're not getting full speed. Then you have the stubborn producers who will not allow their commercial to be presented any other way, and advertisers who will stick to NTSC and tape until they have to absolutely switch.

I really appreciate your insights and was really taken aback by Xizer's attacks on both the article and your responses, so I apologize and thank you for explaining things like you do.

[foxeng]

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.