Having recently availed myself with a new HD television I am generally enjoying the experience.
However, can anyone tell me why Southern Cross (10) and WIN (9) do not provide a complete HD station? They only broadcast a few slim offerings in to Canberra, with a loop of generic scenery/images filling in the rather large gaps between HD programming.
The other capitals around Australia seem to get a much better deal in this regard. Prime looks to be the only commercial offering in Canberra to provide a complete HD option (well, limited as they are by Channel 7’s excellent level of mediocrity).
Why is this so? And when will Canberra’s HDTV options improve to match our bigger city cousins?
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I agree BD, but live F1 would be nice. If only it was on Foxtel, haha!
I was wondering what the deal was with the HD channels too. In the end I decided it wasn’t worth worrying about as I only really watch Fox. Can’t face sitting through utter shite made for numbskulls such as Big Brother, Australian Idiot, Rove or that bloody dancing crap with the “celebrities” in it, interlaced with 1000 advert breaks making a 30 minute show into 3 hours…
Now Packer’s gone, why don’t we ditch his plan to block the use of all of the new bandwidth made available by the advent of digital television with pointless multiple simultaneous transmissions of the same signal. All that his greed has achieved is to push people away from yesterday’s model of a single channel information source to the Internet where there is no restriction on the sharing of information. When will the television broadcasters realise that the only way for them to survive is to compete by providing multi-channel content rather than attempting to force us to live with yesterdays model.
Yes you’d think that with all the competition, the free to air TV stations would be bending over backwards to endear themselves to viewers, rather than engineering newer and better ways to piss off their viewers and drive them to other viewing sources.
Bit like when CT was putting out a crappy website because they were a “newspaper”. (Good thing for RA I guess!) Now they are starting to engage the community through an improving website.
You can’t swim against a riptide or you just get dead.
Gungahlin Al said :
Sounds typical! Yes the PVR feature was handy but 95% of my recordings are kids shows now that the 5 year old has figured out how to record playschool! Personally the internet supplies 99% of our viewing pleasure because of (a) the ridiculous start and end times (never as advertised) (b) sick of starting to watch a show only to have it mysteriously stop mid series or switched to 11pm on a random night of the week and (c) the ridiculous amount of time it takes for aussie TV to actually screen shows from overseas and then they just do (b) to annoy everyone some more.
The Today show in the morning is great in HD. When the ads come on, they flick back to the soothing test pattern of spotted cuscuses and such. No Ad’s…its great!
Not just you aronde. It was just SBS and ABC2 that were hopeless with the EPG but I’ve noticed a couple of others are crook now too.
Because of course EPG makes it easy to program your PVR to record shows after which you can rip through the ads. Harder to program = less likely to record.
Same as the way they’ve stuffed G-Code by farting around with start and end times…
Slightly off topic but my set top box has stopped displaying the names of the shows when I flick the channels (says ‘no info available’). Is this something wrong with my box or did the TV channels stop transmitting that information for everyone?
@Angry, yes they do. I’ve heard in the past it has something to do with our Mickey Mouse aggregate channels, (Prime, WIN, Capital) as opposed to the “proper” channels (7, 9, 10).
Foxtel iQ would be great if we got the FTA channels thru Foxtel here. Alas we have to make do with more roundabouts and stuff all traffic issues instead.
Holden Caulfield said :
Do they really??? Christ I hate Foxtel!!!
p1 said :
Then go download the HD rips 😛 they are generally around 1 gig tho. The way FTA TV is in Australia i see absolutely nothing wrong with piracy. Provide me a service that is worth watching ads for and i might reconsider.
p1 said :
Lol the only thing analogue has over digital. In bad whether the analogue signial will be displayed continually while the signal degrades as conditions get worse until it is unwatchable. However as soon as digital comes up against a few too many errors your screen goes blank. In an extreme storm analogue is better as you can still catch emergency warnings.
perticualy is, of course, a very particular scientific word for a certain type of meteorological phenomena, before you all pick on my spelling….
Sounds like a problem with your antenna, not the broadcaster. Radio waves don’t get blown around by the wind!
fair call, but I also have noticed perticualy windy times seem to break up Prime (and ABC2), and I have an indoor antenna.
Growling Ferret said :
Sounds like a problem with your antenna, not the broadcaster. Radio waves don’t get blown around by the wind!
But what you describe is one of the problems of digital TV. On an analogue tranmission when the signal gets degraded by storms or an antenna moving around you get ghosting, but with digital, you get complete picture break-up. How bad the break-up is and how long it lasts for is a function of the quality of your set-top box. Ie good quality ones have better buffering and or intelligence to guess the missing data, poor quality ones just break-up and take time to resync.
I just want it for the formula 1! …I spoke to SCT at the start of the year and they were saying june/july for the rollout, which then moved to september, and now is the end of the year.
Jonathon Reynolds said :
Sorry I mean 1920x1080p… keep on getting my iMac’s resolution mixed up with what HD is meant to be 😛
Ferret, my understanding is that the digital broadcast is at a lower than full strength because to crank it up would interfere with the analog broadcast. So until analog bites the dust, we are stuck with the interference.
In my previous rental with stinge of a landlord, we has to run our TVs off rabbit ears and SD tuners. Even with direct line of site to Black Mountain out the adjacent window, the reception was so bad at times (especially on Prime) as to be unwatchable.
While we’re at it … how come we only get SBS and ABC (Sydney/NSW) on Foxtel in Canberra, when most other cities get all the FTA channels?
Does anyone else get back picture breakup on Prime during strong wind or storms?
In Canberra digital TV is a joke.
Still higher quality then the Divx copies of shows I download from the intarwebz…