Weather alerts on Locals are driving me nuts - Season Finale of LOST ruined

[Jeffro34tx]

b/c Dish took Voom away.. and that caused the bad weather... and thus ruined the only non-Voom-based HD show in existence.


(hey, its about as well-reasoned as half of the Voom threads )

and yes, our locals in NC do the same thing to HD shows at any excuse with their fancy we-paid-too-much-and-must-show-it-off 5D weather radar

OR... b/c VOOM took Voom away..

 

[headband]

here they will interupt the HD feed with SD only to bring up a message telling me that if I do not have a digital tuner by febuary 17 2009 I will lose my signal....

 

[Jim S.]

As bad as this is, I think it would be even worse if my house were blown away and the station never broke in to give me a warning..

But if you didn't have your TV on, or didn't have a TV, you wouldn't get the warning anyway. Me, I gave up on getting my weather data from the broadcast media when I woke up one morning to go to the bathroom and found the house half flooded, turned on the local 50kW FM station to find out what the hell was going on only to find their inane morning crew doing their normal mindless blather as if nothing had happened.

 

[dfergie]

here they will interupt the HD feed with SD only to bring up a message telling me that if I do not have a digital tuner by febuary 17 2009 I will lose my signal....

to SatelliteGuys! Right after a commercial I bet. The "local" NBC does this at the start of every Earl...

 

[digiblur]

here they will interupt the HD feed with SD only to bring up a message telling me that if I do not have a digital tuner by febuary 17 2009 I will lose my signal....

Yep. I heard from station engineer that they even require that crawl on the digital OTA signal. Knuckleheads...

 

[EmpireState]

As bad as this is, I think it would be even worse if my house were blown away and the station never broke in to give me a warning..

But that isn't the issue, no one is asking the station to not have any alerts. Everyone likes to know there is a storm coming, but this channel ran the crawl and the maps during every single second of the broadcast.

 

[Mr Tony]

Those sons of Beaches!

yep so I figured them a-holes didnt give me NASCAR in HD...I'm not going to watch it on their crappy station in SD

I flipped on the FTA system and watched it from some far off place

 

[osu1991]

We had 3/4 of the Indy 500 in SD because of tornado watches which are an everyday occurrence this time of year on Oklahoma. Our ABC station now has a policy that they will interrupt programming and stay on the air until all warnings have expired in our dma. So of course the other stations don't want to miss out so they follow suit. All our stations have upgraded so they can put the weather overlays on the hd feeds except our ABC, and they have weather subchannels that are useless advertisements now. Two of our stations new hd weather overlays are actually smaller and take up less space than the sd versions, but rarely get used as they just drop programming and go to the studio. The weather crawl and maps are all contained in one box instead of the whole lower part of the screen. Nobody believes me but the weathermen cry wolf so many times around here now that most people just get annoyed and switch to a national channel instead. The weathermen are the biggest reasons for downloading an episode in my opinion.

 

[seminole2001]

Buy the episode on iTunes. Or move out of Tornado alley.

 

[kb7oeb]

A couple of my locals have upgraded to run crawls in HD so its not so intrusive but KSAZ hasn't and had to run SD weather crawls during the SuperBowl. I just laughed imagining the screaming all over town

 

[osu1991]

That is what forced our CBS to upgrade, they dropped the AFC title game to sd and had to come on during commercials to say quit calling in because they were required to show the warnings by the fcc, yet our FOX affiliate had come on during commercials with the weather updates and left the NFC game in HD.

 

[lacruz]

The locals in Jacksonville are terrible about pre-empting programming for weather alerts. They can't just run a crawl; they have to cut into the program for a few minutes AFTER a commercial break so you miss part of the show. Of course they never pre-empt a commercial block or run the crawl during commericals. So basically capitalism and making money outweight alerting the public to dangerous storms. Of course, if the weather is that bad then Dish usually goes bust anyway, so it's a moot point...

 

[Gorbash]

As soon as Austin starts doing their weather warnings because it starts raining a little bit I delete the recording and torrent the episode. The CBS and NBC guys like to freak out over a tenth of an inch of rain and call it the second flood. They don't SD the feed, but their crawl takes up the whole bottom third of the screen, even when the info doesn't change for 2 hours.

Recently they broke into the season finales of all the CBS chows because of possible tornadoes that were knocking out power, we'd lose 1-2 minutes of programming each commercial break, turning an already paltry 42 minute show into 35.

I'm actually quite surprised that Sat and Cable companies aren't required to relay this type of information on cable stations.

 

[mike123abc]

Yep. I heard from station engineer that they even require that crawl on the digital OTA signal. Knuckleheads...

This is probably because Cable/DBS are taking the digital feeds and making SD feeds out of them for their SD customers. NBC has their logo and tons of messages in the 4:3 area of the 16:9. CBS moved their logo over, etc.

 

[Pakbackr]

Agreed - this is annoying! Oddly enough, our local (Raleigh, NC) CBS affiliate (WRAL TV5), which has been known as a leader in HD technology (first local station in the nation to broadcast their news in HD, and a ton of other stuff)...has to switch to an SD signal for weather alerts. Also noticed they do it during the primaries to give results and during Amber Alerts. Their primary competitor in the area, WTVD 11, an ABC affiliate, has the technology that allows alerts to be shown with the HD signal...Go Figure!

 

[jrp]

But that isn't the issue, no one is asking the station to not have any alerts. Everyone likes to know there is a storm coming, but this channel ran the crawl and the maps during every single second of the broadcast.

Probably because they still had active warnings in the viewing area, even if it had passed in your immediate area. FWIW, WHO13 had a weather crawl that did not force their HD (of whatever show my wife was watching) down to SD, so some of our stations are getting it right.

I do agree that the constant weather warnings are overdone, but I think the stations are terrified of not broadcasting a warning that MIGHT be needed. I really can't blame them.

 

[tnsprin]

Considering the severity of the recent tornados, There certainly need to be alerts on Local channels.

Wait until Dish starts putting in alerts on all channels. So far they have only tested national alerts. Than it will be a Dish issue.

 

[8bitbytes]

BitTorrent download the HD version of the episode. 720p res and no commercials.

 

[jerryez]

All of my locals do it, but the make my 65 inch picture about 20 inches in one corner and use 3/4 of the screen for the channel logo and weather alert logos and in one corner they put the radar with a ticker tape going across the screen, but when it comes time for a Finng commecial they go back to full screenh until the commercial is over. The they take over the screen again with the weather alert. Why can't they just run a ;ticker tape across the bottom and quit hogging the whole screen.

 

[dlsnyder]

We had our first tornado EVER in Moreno Valley CA about a week and a half ago. Funny thing was, my wife was telling me about it on the phone while I was sitting in the airport in Omaha waiting for my flight home. We almost never get rain fade either, but from what my wife was saying the Dish signal was cutting in and out making it unwatchable. Weather alerts were not watchable HD or otherwise. That being said, all the channels in the LA DMA do an excellent job with their HD screen crawls for weather and news alerts. We get them most often for flood or brush fire warnings. They are annoying but necessary.

I would much rather know about impending doom and have a degraded picture than watch my favorite show as my house was being sucked up to Oz. YMMV.