Bright House Tampa Bay New HD Channels:

[iceturkee]

longhorn, when did orlando get espnnews hd?

[LonghornXP]

longhorn, when did orlando get espnnews hd?

My mistake on that one as they haven't got ESPNNews HD yet. I was thinking about another market (TWC market) for whatever reason. I usually don't make such careless mistakes though.

[Saxamoophone]

We do go ESPNNews HD whenever ESPN or ESPN2 is blacked out for a magic game...does that count?

[iceturkee]

that's interesting because espn on directv hasn't been blacked out for any magic games so far this season.

[LonghornXP]

Bright House Tampa Bay recently added the following 3 new HD channels.

Cinemax HD - Channel 702 (free with Cinemax subscription).

Travel Channel HD - Channel 743.
MLB HD - Channel 744.

These seem like three decent HD additions but I'm hearing "quite" a bit more HD channels are coming within the next few months. The breakdown of these new additions will be as follows. First this won't occur until you receive thirty day notices of a channel realignment so keep this in mind.

All 26 HBO and Cinemax channels will be added in HD (new hardware must be installed first to convert the MPEG4 feeds to MPEG2 and SDV most likely will be used for these new channels.

The five Starz HD channels will be added along with Starz On Demand (including Starz HD On Demand).

Once this occurs the core premium channels (main Starz feed, main HBO feed etc) will still be offered without SDV but the additional multiplex channels will be SDV.

This will be the bulk of the new additions but they will also be adding another 20-30 HD channels that aren't premiums such as Spike HD etc. I'm not saying Spike HD will be one of the new channels though as I'm just listing the type of channels within this group.

The plan is that by summer they will be at or over 100 total HDTV channels with a major expansion of HD On Demand content most notably subscription HD On Demand additions as apposed to PPV HD On Demand additions.

I hope this gives you all a better idea of what is still to come but alas it still requires waiting but its coming sooner rather than later.

[iceturkee]

why, oh why, would someone want to switch from mpeg4 to mpeg2. that sounds like a downgrade in quality to me!

[Saxamoophone]

why, oh why, would someone want to switch from mpeg4 to mpeg2. that sounds like a downgrade in quality to me!

Of course =). But the Brighthouse Digital Boxes & DVRs are from the 1980s and can't do MPEG-4!

Thanks for the HD-Update though. HBO would be very tempting when it comes out in HD, although I'm REALLY interested in the National Channels. Spike, ESPNEWS-HD, CBS-College Sports, Cartoon Network and Comedy Central are probably the only nationals left that I watch not in HD.

Quick Question too, any idea when Brighthouse will roll Tru2Way support out? I know it's coming slowwwlllyyy, but I would REALLY love to get my hands on that new EchoStar (Dishnetwork) DVR w/ Slingbox built-in. EchoStar is saying they want to launch a Tru2Way Cable Version of the device mid-year, which I think would BLOW AWAY the current systems BH uses!

[LonghornXP]

why, oh why, would someone want to switch from mpeg4 to mpeg2. that sounds like a downgrade in quality to me!

If this wasn't done no BHN customer would see the other 22 or so HBO/Cinemax HD channels until every customers HD boxes were swapped out with new MPEG4 capable boxes. Or they could transcode the MPEG4 signal to MPEG2 which would allow all current and future HD boxes to view these channels.

I think this will be quite an easy choice and also the MPEG4 transport streams are higher quality compared to what would be sent out to customers boxes even if you had MPEG4 boxes. Really you most likely won't notice any difference in picture quality as they are using high end professional transcoders.