Football HD glitch at local Austin ABC station

Archived from groups: alt.tv.tech.hdtv (More info?)

Here in Austin, the Big 12 Championship Game Saturday night, which was
supposed to be in HD, was in SD, instead. Nationally, it was in HD.

This morning, I talked to an engineer at the local ABC affilliate, KVUE-TV.
I told him about the problem Saturday night and he said he would investigate
and call me back. Half hour later, he calls. The station has a switch that
is supposed to automatically kick over (electronically, digitally, whatever)
when there is an HD program coming down from the network. If this does not
happen, they have a new alarm system that is supposed to alert the board
operator who then makes it happen manually.

Saturday night, the automatic HD switch did not work and no one had told the
board operator about the new alarm. He had a monitor, of course, but
apparently didn't know the game should have been in HD and wasn't. So, the
whole game was broadcast in SD and, what's worse, the engineer told me that
if I or someone had not called, Monday Night Football tonight would probably
also have been broadcast in SD.

What amazed me was that no one in station management -- the station manager,
program director, chief engineer, etc. -- had an HDTV at home, saw the
problem and called it in. Just further proves my theory that TV station
management is generally useless, at best. And, as of mid-morning, I was the
only viewer who had called about it.

Moral: When you don't get HD and you should -- call somebody! Cable
company and/or local affilliate. In this case, other HD channels from the
cable company were fine, so I figured the problem was probably with the
local affilliate, which it turned out to be.

mack
austin