Olympic Streams

jbhtexas

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Oct 20, 2006
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Another blown opportunity to exploit the capabilities of OTA HD. Our local NBC affiliate (76% owned by NBCUniversal) is showing the Olympics on 5.1, urban/contemporary living programming on 5.2, and mirroring 5.1 on 5.3. Why not show a second different Olympics stream on 5.3? It's already up and running in 16x9 HD. What's the point of mirroring 5.1?

I don't have cable TV, so I can't get the Internet streams, even though I fork over a bundle to TimeWarner for high speed Internet.
 

ricochet

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Sep 4, 2008
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Another blown opportunity to exploit the capabilities of OTA HD. Our local NBC affiliate (76% owned by NBCUniversal) is showing the Olympics on 5.1, urban/contemporary living programming on 5.2, and mirroring 5.1 on 5.3. Why not show a second different Olympics stream on 5.3? It's already up and running in 16x9 HD. What's the point of mirroring 5.1?

It's a bandwidth issue. There is only one physical Olympic stream and both 5.1 and 5.3 are showing it. Do they normally have something else on 5.3? My guess is that during the Olympics they dropped that in order to improve the HD picture. If they drop the 5.3 subchannel completely some tuners may need to do a rescan to see it again when the Olympics are over. This way when the Olympics are over they put whatever used to be on 5.3 back and everybody still works.
 

jbhtexas

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Oct 20, 2006
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Arlington, TX
It's a bandwidth issue. There is only one physical Olympic stream and both 5.1 and 5.3 are showing it. Do they normally have something else on 5.3? My guess is that during the Olympics they dropped that in order to improve the HD picture. If they drop the 5.3 subchannel completely some tuners may need to do a rescan to see it again when the Olympics are over. This way when the Olympics are over they put whatever used to be on 5.3 back and everybody still works.

Bandwidth certainly plays a part, but so do programming choices. What I would like to see NBC do is use 720p HD (which uses a little less bandwith than 1080i and can be compressed better) on the primary channel, compress the primary channel a bit more to free up a little bandwidth, and then put a 16:9 SD Olympic stream on the subchannel. The urban/contemporary living channel has a few shows that get rerun over and over again. I don't think anybody would really have missed it for two weeks.
 

jbhtexas

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Oct 20, 2006
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Arlington, TX
NBC is 1080i on the network level. They probably can't just flip a switch and have 720p work.

The format can be changed at the station level, even if the network doesn't switch to 720p. For example, WFAA, the local ABC affiliate in DFW, for whatever reason broadcasts in 1080i, even though ABC is 720p.