Why duplicate channels in the movie channels?

[philhu]

It has always bothered me. VOOM has limited bandwidth, so why do they duplicate channels?

The show the SD and HD version of otherwise identical movie channels.

Is there a reason? Why would anyone watch the sd of a channel, and not the hd of the channel?

They could remove the sd dups and add a few more hd movie channels, like the west coast TMC, HBO, etc.

 

[Sean Mota]

Contracts. This is how the programmers do it everywhere. You won't get starz-hd unless you are carry the SD channels. There is just no way around this until the day that everything is HD.

 

[Ilya]

I personally think this requirement was established for D*, E* and C*, and then the exact same rule was forced on V*, even though in case of VOOM it doesn't make much sense.

 

[jgantert]

Well, based on the free Showtime this weekend, it looks like Voom is compressing those SD channels a ton, so it can't take up too much bandwidth.

-John