I know the sports aren't PBS sports. Here's what irks me about NET and their schedule messing. I've been recording every episode of "As Time Goes By" for the wife............Now I have to wait another 9 months! ........... Earlier this year they mis-scheduled 3 "Mystery" shows in a row. .... There isn't a month goes by they don't mess something up.
That's why I so desperately want an alternative.
Yeah, I completely understand your frustration. It's definately annoying when they get you used to a schedule then mess it up. When one of my TVRO components went down this year, I switched over from sat to my local PBS station, recording OTA instead of off sat, and I too missed a couple episodes of Mystery, and also missed a couple episodes of Great Performances when the Titan TV schedule was wrong for the PBS-HD channel for several weeks.
I was mainly trying to point out that some sports used to be part of "PBS" programming, since PBS's goal was to provide programming that the major networks didn't seem to think were profitable. However after posting, I started thinking, and it turns out that I was wrong. I remembered watching several sporting events, including the likes of Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall playing in the USLTA championship on my local "PBS" station (WQED), and also remember other interesting programming like the Mummer's parade and other neat things you don't see on commercial TV. HOWEVER... I just checked, and PBS didn't EXIST when I saw that programming. Turns out, that what I was watching was the precursor to PBS, something called "National Educational Television". I had forgotten about that transition. I think that the evolution of NET (not "Nebraska, but National) into PBS, is kind of like public TV going professional, or at least semi-pro. Public TV was a bit more "pure" back then. It was truely non-profit, whereas the current PBS is hardly different from NBC or CBS.
But anyway, sorry for the false info of sports on PBS... it was on the old NET, not PBS.
It's kind of dissappointing that PBS seems to be intentionally trying to exclude TVRO viewers. I can understand that they feel they have a responsibility to their member stations and they feel that they believe that their raw feed transponders should not be public (I don't agree), and understand that the writing is pretty much on the wall, that in a few years, our only access to PBS will probably be over our own local stations, that many can't get OTA, and will have to pay to receive DN or DTV to get........ However the fact that they are keeping up that AMC-4 analog transponder shows me that down deep they know that they owe TVROers a channel or two that they can watch. But it's weird that they are spending money to keep up that transponder, and yet keeping it at such low power that many can't pull it in without sparklies. Sort of like they're trying to wean C-banders off that channel onto DVB so that when they kill the transponder nobody will notice. I just hope that when they do finally give up that analog transponder, that maybe they'll give us another C-band DVB signal, something similar to the narrow band NET DBS channel.
The way PBS is doing this transition is really confusing to me, ie I don't understand the AMC-3 12180 getting weaker and weaker, and then the 12120 switching from S2 to having the same programming as 12180 in QPSK, but stronger? And also the horizontal channels on AMC-21 seem to be jumping around in strength, one day strong, the next weak. I know they're coming from different uplinkers... I just hope it's a situation of some of the uplinkers not quite being as far into the transition as others yet. Luckily, it seems like AMC3 is still if fairly good condition for the time being. I'd just like them to get this thing settled down, so we'd all know what is available and what we need to do to upgrade to get what's available. Unfortunately, I think I'm going to need to plant a new dish to get AMC-21 well, and unfortunately my ground is now frozen, and I can't dig a hole anymore. Wish they would have done this transition in the summer months.
