HDTV Almanac - Who Has the Most HDTV?

[alfredpoor]

Ah, the HDTV channel wars are heating up again. Earlier this week, Dish Network announced that it was going to add eight more HD channels, bringing its “total” to 200 HD channels. Then DirecTV revealed plans to add 30 more HD channels this year, bringing its “total” to 160 HD channels. Now, I’ve put “total” [...]

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[AVInsights]

Folks,
WITHOUT even reading the article, the channels these folks provide are "garbage"....................content NOT numbers are the ONLY criteria for "extra" HD channels, IMHO!!!

[alfredpoor]

You won't get an argument from me, Bob. The problem is that your fellow consumers don't act as if they agree with you. Back when I wrote for PC Magazine, we'd have massive feature tables that provided a detailed comparison of the products we had tested. We found that in many cases, the readers would just tally all the checkmarks, and the product with the most marks won. They did not stop to consider whether any of the features had more importance for their use than others.

I'm afraid the same thing is happening with HD channel counts. These services wouldn't be bragging about the quanitity if the consumers weren't responding favorably to the bigger numbers.

The only thing that will change this, as far as I can see, is if we can get to a la carte pricing. Then people will shop for the channels they want, and compare prices for the combinations that they will actually watch. For many reasons, I don't think we'll get to a la carte for either cable or satellite simply because of the way their businesses are structured. As TV over the Internet grows, however, the a la carte approach may well change how consumers shop for their TV content.

Alfred

[akirby]

Some people respond to numbers (I just bought a HDTV and I want to see HD channels) but these "garbage" channels must have viewers, otherwise they wouldn't be on the air in the first place.

As of right now, all of the channels I care about are already HD so I pay no attention to these claims. But clearly others do.

I do, however, believe in fairness in advertising and advertising part time or PPV channels as HD channels is marginal at best and IMO downright deceptive.

[alfredpoor]

Ah, what's an "HD channel"? That's a tough question if you start looking at it closely. Does it have to show all its content in HD? What if the programming is in HD, but has some SD commercials? Is it still an HD channel? Or what if some of the programming itself is in SD, but the rest is in HD? How much HD content does it take to make it legit? What if they take the SD content and scale it up to HD? Does that count as an HD channel?

I think it's difficult to have an objective definition of what qualifies as an HD channel.

Alfred

[AVInsights]

Alfred,
Boy, The "fan would really get hit" if the providers went a la carte..............I watch maybe 10HD channels ONLY @ maybe $3.00/channel i.e $30.00 vs FIOS @ $57.99

[akirby]

Simple to me. Ignore the content because the provider has no control over that. It has to be a broadcast channel broadcasting full time in 720p or 1080i/p, not On Demand or individual program PPV (e.g. a PPV movie repeated every 3 hours). I'm ok with block/time based PPV for channels that broadcast different programming throughout the day.

People used to complain about ESPNHD only broadcasting HD sources a few times per week - saying that wasn't really enough to call it ESPNHD. I disagreed then and now. What it really means is the channel has the capability to broadcast HD sources.

[ccclvib]

A great example of questionable HD is TCM, which, I guess, is one of the new HD channels on Dish. Since a large majority of the movies shown on TCM are in the original format, and some even silent, the format portion of HD is definitely no being met. However, if the picture is 1080i/p the density of the picture is there. So...?

Regarding "nothing to watch." I, too, have gone through the entire lineup on Dish many times and not found anything I want to invest my time in. Fortunately, I don't take it all that seriously. Shutting down the video side of the system and listening to streaming audio while reading suits me fine. I wonder, though, if given an option of selecting a channel and then paying for its use at the end of the month might be something worth considering. I'd probably spend LOTS less on my Dish bill.

[videograbber]

I do, however, believe in fairness in advertising and advertising part time or PPV channels as HD channels is marginal at best and IMO downright deceptive.

Ah, what's an "HD channel"? That's a tough question if you start looking at it closely.

In some ways, yes. In other ways, no.

Does it have to show all its content in HD?

No, though the majority of its content should be, whenever possible. I.e., at this stage, not all content is available in HD, and excluding EVERYTHING in SD would mean a lot would get thrown out. But I'd consider the broadcast channels to be HD (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, PBS), even though currently mostly only their prime-time lineups are in HD. So their HD content %age is relatively low. Though many stations are adding capabilities to capture and broadcast syndicated programming in HD as well.

What if the programming is in HD, but has some SD commercials? Is it still an HD channel?

Absolutely.

Or what if some of the programming itself is in SD, but the rest is in HD? How much HD content does it take to make it legit?

My metric is if the content they're airing is available in HD, they shouldn't be showing it in SD. That's not an HD channel. If the content is only available in SD, then an upconvert is OK. However, a channel that broadcast ALL their "HD" content from SD sources would not be considered a true HD channel in my book.

What if they take the SD content and scale it up to HD? Does that count as an HD channel?

Absolutely not. TNT and TBS fail the test here, big time. What's worse is that they take these low-quality upconverts, frequently distort and stretch them, then call the result "HD". IMO, that's just fraud, plain and simple. They compound the problem by providing the Guide sources (Tribune, etc.) with program specs that indicate that this degraded trash is in HD, which is blatently false. So viewers have no way to weed out the wheat from the chaff.

Lastly, when an HD channel is airing upconverted material, they need to change their logo to remove the HD part. You may think this isn't feasible, but it is. Check out USA-HD. They have a "USA HD" bug/logo that airs with their HD content, which switches to "USA" when they're airing SD. I applaud them for that. That's the honest and responsible thing to do. It's so obvious that that's the way it should be for EVERYBODY, but TNT/TBS would squalk about this, since so much of their content is actually SD.

Frankly, I'd think that the "Truth in Advertising" laws we already have on the books would prevent channels like TNT/TBS from pulling the shenanigans they're perpetrating, because they're extremely deceptive. And they're meant to deceive. Naive viewer, "Well, sure it's in HD. It says so right there on the screen! They couldn't do that if it wasn't true." And then what hurts everybody, especially legitimate HD providers, "Gee, HD doesn't look much different from SD! What's the big deal about? HD is just a bunch of hype."

I think it's difficult to have an objective definition of what qualifies as an HD channel.

I think it's possible to come up with a reasonable definition. But no one is doing so. It's much easier (and better for marketing purposes) to simply fall back on a purely technical definition of "if the signal you're putting out is in one of the ATSC HD formats (720p, 1080i), then your channel is HD". Regardless of both the content (the same film aired 16 times all day, every day) or the source material (SD, or even 4x3 SD).

- Tim

[videograbber]

Alfred wrote:

I’ve put “total” in quotes because not everyone might agree with the count. For example, Dish Network includes 72 pay-per-view HD movie slots in the total. Is a 90-minute program equivalent to a channel that has 24 hours of content a day?

Absolutely not. The problem here is "lumping", and we need to get away from that. In the same way that the Sat providers can no longer lump their HD local-to-local services into their channel counts, the PPV channels should simply be listed separately, never as part of the mix.

I.e., at one point, they used to count the 5 HD channels for each local market, times 50 or more markets, to inflate their numbers to many hundreds of "HD Channels". And of course, it's good that they have that diversity (and expensive to provide!), but deceptive to lump them, because I can't watch any of the other 49 markets, and neither can you. So whether it's 200, 300, or 500... all any one viewer can get is 5. [It would be somewhat different if we were allowed to watch out-of-market feeds, because then I could watch time-shifted, or switch to a station that WASN'T covering half the screen with weather or political crawls. But that's verboten by the monopoly locals have. But I digress.]

So PPV channels should ALWAYS be listed separately, never lumped. Doing so is intentionally deceptive (I didn't even know about it, until you exposed it here), and Dish is playing on people's tendency to not look too closely. In my book, that costs them big-time in credibility. I.e., they're just BS'ers, trying to scam people. This is made even worse by the fact that there's not even 72 movies on those 72 PPV channels. You have to divide that by N, to account for the time-shifting they have to employ, to compete with the PPV/VOD from the cable companies, which have the capability to start playing a movie anytime YOU want.

Lastly, once they open the door to lumping PPV and VOD content, that means cable companies can count every single HD film they have on their servers as a "channel". I can guarantee that cable co's. can add another 15 GB to their disk farm a lot faster and more cheaply than the sat providers can add transponder space for another PPV channel. They'll lose that escalating "arms race" fast.

DirecTV can also claim some bragging rights from the fact that it also will have four 3DTV channels, including the new ESPN 3D channel and one 3D movie on-demand service. Granted, only a handful of households will be able to make use of these, but it is an important first step in providing stereoscopic content for its subscribers.

Yes, that's legitimate. However, my beef with them is that they love to promote what they're going to have, someday. Rather than what they're actually providing right now. More BS.

All this bragging over the number of channels seems to lose its punch when you’ve just surfed through the whole range for the second time, trying in vain to find something that you want to watch. As with most things, there comes a point where quality trumps quantity. If none of these extra channels add content that enough subscribers want to watch, it doesn’t matter who has the most.

Very true. And this is compunded by the fact that with the explosion of specialty HD channels we've had, there's not enough content to fill them all. This results in a real, true HD channel (all HD, all the time), but with the same content broadcast hundreds (or even thousands!) of times. To the point that after a while, you've seen everything they have in their archives. What good is a channel like that?

But the key is to stop trying to trick people with misleading and deceptive advertising, that may in some sense be technically true, but realistically false. Stop "lumping" (by listing each class of service separately), and this problem goes away.

- Tim