HD Broadcasting

it is HD…

I think I now understand why people don’t watch the HD version of a channel.

I was visiting a family member yesterday night and they asked if there was anything I wanted to watch on TV… I said I’d like to watch “Channel Nine”.

They scrolled straight past 9HD, specifically looking for the channel written as “Nine” in the EPG Info.
When I then asked, “why not return to 9HD”, the person genuinely didn’t realise they broadcast the same thing.

The person knows shows they want to watch that are “on Nine” and always just goes to “Nine” on the TV

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i know with my father i had to tell him that 9 even had hd and it was on channel 50 instead of 5 or when i wanted to priime 7 i told him they had a hd channel now and put it on prime7 hd even tho sometimes i had notice the voice and mouth was not in snick a had to move up one channel then go back maybe it could be his set top box it is a target brand lol

My nearly 65 year old mother notices HD . When she was in New Zealand a few years ago she mentioned to me when she got back how crystal clear and sharp/bright the channels there were at the time compared to in Australia.

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Is this on LCN 5?

I’m constantly educating friends at their places about the HD channels available, seems the take up or general knowledge about them after all this time is still very limited.

I honestly can’t believe anyone with a tv bigger than say 55” will willingly watch and accept standard definition television.

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Sadly, some people just don’t know any better or don’t care.

That kind of attitude from the general public isn’t going to help advance the cause away from the inefficient MPEG-2 standard.

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The only way to get some people to watch a HD channel is to switch the LCN allocation. No amount of promos or on screen banners is going alert them to the fact that their favourite programs are available on another channel with improved picture quality. My parents very quickly learnt to use 209 and 210 on Foxtel and even worked out 202 and later 207 when they came along for themselves before I mentioned them.

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It was 51. The LCN numbers seemed to mean absolutely nothing to the person in particular, they were just looking at the channel names.

They were scrolling through looking at the channel names, went straight past “9HD” (50) and settled on “Nine” (51)

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Poor things - give them a break, they just got used to not going to channel 8 for the programs, telling them to use 50 would be too much :grin:

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Problem is that none of the networks actually tell people about the HD channel.

Nine does put 9HD in its promos. But that means nothing to most people. They probably think they’re watching in HD on LCN9 etc

They need to educate. As in…” did you know you could be watching MKR in crystal clear HD…”

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Prime7 had a graphic at the beginning of the Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony that it was in HD on Channel 60, iirc. A scrolling message every hour on the SD main channel might help prod viewers to change?

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I personally think the best way to get people watching the HD channels is to eventually provide viewers with no other option than the MPEG4 HD broadcast of the main channels.

The only way this will successfully happen is with a major analogue switchoff/digital retune-style public awareness campaign…although I suspect the idea of selling a “MPEG2 to MPEG4 switch” to the Australian public has been put into the “too hard” basket by the networks and will not happen anytime in the foreseeable future.

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If the government do as they have announced then ABC and SBS will be sharing one multiplex and will be forced to use MPEG-4 and/or HEVC.

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They should use the spare multiplex used for Community TV for extra SBS/ABC channels, while keeping the community channels that are left.

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You could use VHF 10 for extra ABC / SBS channels, also I think there is a spare multiplex on UHF.
Some late night calculating would work out to combind the streams into one mux

These streams are all HD and in MPEG 4 with AAC audio.

Total comes up to 21.946Mbps to the mux, excluding null packets, EPG data and other stuff.

ABC

ABC 3mpbs, audio 256kpbs
ABC Comedy = 2.9mbps, audio 256kbps
ABC ME = 2.1mpbs, audio 128kbps
ABC NEWS = 2.6mbps, audio 192kbps
double j (AUDIO) = 96kbps
triple j (AUDIO) 192kbps
ABC Jazz (AUDIO) = 128kbps

SBS

SBS ONE 3.1mpbs, audio 192kbps
SBS VICELAND 2.5mpbs, audio 192kbps
Food Network 2.5mbps, audio 120kbps
NITV (SD) 1.2mbps, audio 96kbps
Radio 1 (AUDIO) 105kbps
Radio 2 (AUDIO) 105kbps
Radio 3 (AUDIO) 64kbps
Arabic 24 (AUDIO) 80kbps

For some reason The Morning Show was broadcast in SD today in Brisbane.

Post brought to you by the HD Police

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Is the weekend “highlights” edition of The Morning Show ever in HD?

I know that on the weekday version, all the pre-recorded segments/infomercials are shown in upconverted SD (or at least that was the case when I last checked).

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Well it was just the mashed together bits from last week that they put together in their weekend shows, nothing too special to get excited about seeing in HD…

It’s surprising that there is still workflows within the networks that are still SD. Surely the hardware in all production and edit suites can handle HD (heck it can probably even handle 4K). It’s probably just a case of changing the output video format.