gary
I just get so jealous of the huge markets I hear about getting their local newscasts in HD and was thinking that if one station in our area would do that, they would own the market until the rest joined. If they are going to spend all of this money to broadcast a digital signal, they might as well get the most out of it.
P.S. How many of you get angry when there is a weather alert during a big game or show that switches off the HD and makes your eyes sore? They should at least work on fixing that because after the transition, the networks will not bother to send and SD feed of an HD show to the stations, which will mean when a weather alert comes on, the background will go dark while it is on.
Posted July 10, 2008 1:44am in
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I'm with you, Gary. It's
I'm with you, Gary.
It's high time one of the stations went high-def for local news, even if only during their in-studio segments.
I thought I had a poll previously about which station would be first to jump to HD news but I can't seem to find it. Maybe I confused it with something else. I'm going to add the poll to the front page now because I'm curious about it. Personally, I think WFRV would be first to go. I think with Liberty Media behind them and their only owning the one TV station, it would seem less of an expansive investment than LIN or Young or Journal. Plus WFRV was the first to broadcast digital, so I think they would have an interest in leading the way.
What I'd love to see, but I know would never happen, is for WIWB (Ch. 14) to start doing local news and to have them launch news in HD to leapfrog their way into the market. I used to work there for a short time though, and their current office space is way too small to really support a news operation of any kind.
The SD weather alert thing on the DTV feed has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. This gets even worse during election season. I don't know for sure, but it seems that WGBA (Ch. 26) has the ability to key over an HD feed when they do station IDs over NBC programs at the top of the hour. They used to switch to SD to do the legal ID key then switch back, but now it stays HD when they do it. I'm guessing they have the ability, but for a master control operator over there, running duplicate feeds for two channels, it's probably not easy to do separate weather keys.
Milwaukee doesn't have much
Milwaukee doesn't have much local content in HD yet, either. I know that a couple years ago WISN-12 carried the fireworks from Summerfest live in HD (they did it again this year too). They made sure we all knew it was the "first local HD broadcast on a Wisconsin commercial TV station". To pull it off they rented the HD production truck from Milwaukee Public Television, where a lot of local HD material is produced.
A friend of mine works at a
A friend of mine works at a local station here in Green Bay. I asked her about it and she had no idea when the newscasts would be shot in HD. What would be really nice is like you said about the weather updates and things. When I was watching the Stanley Cup finals, it was annoying when 26 would switch to the SD feed to put the weather graphics in the corner.
IMHO, I think news in HD is a waste of space. An anchor's head can only fill so much of the screen. I really like how CNBC presents their HD channel. SD picture in one corner and other content, including a longer scroll at the bottom, that fills the rest.