The New Face Of Television?

In the broadcast world the newest and best are always the same. If you watch, most television stations are always trying to show viewers that they each have the most advanced equipment so that they can produce the best programing possible. This is especially true in the news field. They are constantly advertising that they are using large amounts of modern equipment to get the news to you. Think about what they do and what they say. How many times do they brag about the “high definition” picture that they are sending out? One local station always has the “HD” nest to the “live” every time they show the picture from some outside location even the background shots for the weather. They have been doing this for some time and so is every other station in town. This is about as pertinent as the use of the logo “in living color” that was prominent for a long time when color television had already become the normal. It would be more of an anomaly to say a show is in black and white or standard definition to show the difference.

When I was growing up one local station in Fresno had live color programing from their studio (KJEO). That was doing something new and different, yet it went unnoticed by most, since it was the local news and very few homes actually had color TV’s. Another Fresno station made a big deal of broadcasting a movie in color and Cinemascope. (KMJ-TV) To put these in perspective, the local newspaper would have color on the front page on Sunday and it took a week to get the photo ready.

How long was it until NBC stopped using the peacock open to indicate color? How long before they decide that HD is the normal and that we have moved beyond that in broadcasting.

Today many stations sending out not one but up to four different streams of programing with at least one in high definition while the others are of lesser quality. The fact is that they are doing more in the same amount of spectrum that was used before. Now we have all of those choices besides all of the cable channels and still on some days, nothing that is watchable.

The next step is for the cable industry to catch up. They don’t seem to be able to put all of these streams of video in one place. They may have four programs coming from one source but instead of rebroadcasting them in order, they have they scattered on their digital signal. An example would be a station on channel 4 is now listed as 4.1 and the other sub channels are 4.2, 4.3 etc…yet on my cable they are 404 and 225? This is only an example some of the others are even weirder. Before the cable went all digital they were in their logical location, but with the digital converter they moved.

So you see all of the advances at the trade shows and then you wait forever for the newest to come to your home. Then you wait until after all the hype and maybe you will see these new advances become the normal.