TV Land in HD?

bluegras

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Apr 18, 2008
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one of these days all the channels on dish will be in HD and then next people will ask for 4k which i do not have a 4k tv the ones i see at walmart cost 740 dollars which i cannot afford at the moment.what is the surprise they are talking about in the pub i wish i was a member in there.
 

Hall

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Feb 14, 2004
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I prefer MeTV over TVLand and find I watch MeTV more often...
Since the original request was about TV Land in HD, does anyone have MeTV in HD ? A local station in Dayton and one in Cincinnati both carry MeTV but it's a sub-channel and not in HD. I presume it's a sub-channel in almost every market, if not 100%, and not in HD anywhere.
 

TNGTony

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Sep 7, 2003
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So we are in near unanimous agreement in this thread that TV Land should be in HD. So here is the question. We know that bandwidth is limited and at this time Dish cannot really add any HD channels without taking another away or compromising the PQ even further on other channels. So, which one HD channel (or 4 SD channels) do you want to see gone in order to get TV Land in HD before the MPEG 4 conversion?

Shopping channel pay to be on the service
Most, if not all religious channels are part of the Public Interest mandate and cannot go away
Many of the small diginets are part of bundles from mega-corps that Dish has to offer in order to keep the popular channels.
 
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lparsons21

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So a question comes to mind. The EA is already MPEG4, does that mean there is now more room for HD channels on the EA? Since the WA is not yet MPEG4 I assume they are waiting to add HD channels until they can offer them on both arcs.
 

Tampa8

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The thinking is there will be more space soon with the changeover. I would also have to think they can add a little more HD now.
 

Hall

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Since the WA is not yet MPEG4 I assume they are waiting to add HD channels until they can offer them on both arcs.
Correct. Dish will not add national channels to just one arc. Western Arc is nearly full.
Imagine the outcry if they did though ! Well wait, outside of discussion groups like this, the average customer would have no idea whatsoever about this.
 

ChadT41

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Imagine the outcry if they did though ! Well wait, outside of discussion groups like this, the average customer would have no idea whatsoever about this.
I disagree. Some customers who move now, loses one of the ions. It's not a large outcry, but for some reason that was one that some people would call in about, when moving arcs.
 

Hall

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Dish has what, 13 million customers ? How many watch ION ... and move ... to a different arc ... not to mention stay with Dish ?
 

ChadT41

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I said it was small. And the calls weren't often. If you put more popular channels on though, that is when you would see it more. That was the point I was making Hall.
 

DishSubLA

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Apr 9, 2006
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No one here knows.

Regarding Reba, it doesn't seem to have been shot in HD to begin with. Well, maybe it was and the original film can be used. For network TV, it was broadcast in 1.33:1 ratio.
They may have gone back and rescanned the film for HD to provide greater value to the show in repeats. The studios have gone back and done full HD on a number of shows ON FILM that are pretty old but originally in SD only such as TJ Hooker, Cheers, Friends, and Seinfeld among others. They look pretty good. In fact, Cheers on HDNET (now AXIS) looked so good that one could see the perspiration on Ted Danson's forehead and can clearly make out he was wearing a hairpiece, it was that good.
 

DishSubLA

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Since the original request was about TV Land in HD, does anyone have MeTV in HD ? A local station in Dayton and one in Cincinnati both carry MeTV but it's a sub-channel and not in HD. I presume it's a sub-channel in almost every market, if not 100%, and not in HD anywhere.
KABC airs the ABC owned Living Well channel in HD on the sub-channel. Both main and LW HD are in 720P, and the second sub-channel is SD. It took them a while, and probably the best MPEG2 encoder out there, but they finally got both HD channels to look good, but clearly NOT as good as if they just used the entire 19Mps for the main channel only.
 

Hall

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They may have gone back and rescanned the film for HD to provide greater value to the show in repeats. The studios have gone back and done full HD on a number of shows ON FILM that are pretty old but originally in SD only such as TJ Hooker, Cheers, Friends, and Seinfeld among others. They look pretty good. In fact, Cheers on HDNET (now AXIS) looked so good that one could see the perspiration on Ted Danson's forehead and can clearly make out he was wearing a hairpiece, it was that good.
Oh yeah, I know it's possible to do that. I remember reading articles about this many years ago when HD was finally becoming more popular and a lot of discussion was related to how to deal with shows like Friends, Seinfield, etc that were shot on video, not film. It was said then that it simply can't be done as the resolution isn't there. They were also filmed in 1.33:1 ratio and it talked about how they'd have to chop the top and bottom off and use pan-and-scan but the problem with that was people or objects on the sides would often end up out of frame or half-on and half-off.

Yet after all of that, I've seen Friends on Netflix in "HD" and yeah, it looks pretty good. I think I've seen Seinfield somewhere too and it was good looking too.
 

bobvick

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Correct. Dish will not add national channels to just one arc. Western Arc is nearly full. The space they have is for back-up in case of TP failure.
Western Arc will have 30% more capacity than it does now when they FINALLY finish the QPSK to 8PSK conversion. That will add a substantial amount of space, plenty enough for some more HD channels. Also, Echostar 18 is launching at 110W which might allow some shifting on the WA to provide a little more space.
 

DishSubLA

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Oh yeah, I know it's possible to do that. I remember reading articles about this many years ago when HD was finally becoming more popular and a lot of discussion was related to how to deal with shows like Friends, Seinfield, etc that were shot on video, not film. It was said then that it simply can't be done as the resolution isn't there. They were also filmed in 1.33:1 ratio and it talked about how they'd have to chop the top and bottom off and use pan-and-scan but the problem with that was people or objects on the sides would often end up out of frame or half-on and half-off.

Yet after all of that, I've seen Friends on Netflix in "HD" and yeah, it looks pretty good. I think I've seen Seinfield somewhere too and it was good looking too.
I thought Friends and all the show I cited were shot on film. Further, that is why we can enjoy those shows in HD today, because we can't do the same with video shot at 525/Standard Definition. There is some up-scaling of 525 video, but it does not look good. And even SD video shot at 24fps will still look pretty bad if unscaled. Among some British shows shot with SD video to look like film are the Inbetweeners and League of Gentelmen. Sadly we will never see those re-released in Blu-ray, or at least not in our lifetime. If I'm mistaken, forgive me.

However, some shows, like Star Trek TNG, while in HD, will never see the 16:9 light of day, so to speak, and are forever doomed to 4:3 because they used the additional space for FX, while other SD shows have things showing at the edges like crew and equipment that are visible at 16:9.
 
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