OETA to Resume OTA HD Programming
Yancy writes:
Just received an e-mail response from Mark Norman, Deputy Director for OETA. I had written info@oeta.tv to ask about some bit error-induced artifacts that I was experiencing, and the fact that I could not find the OETA-HD channel despite its being listed on their digital television schedule page (after visiting hdtvok.com, I found that OETA-HD only currently exists for Cox Cable customers). Imagine my surprise at receiving an answer from the Deputy Director! Here are some excerpts from that e-mail:
“Thanks for your email to OETA. For the last year OETA has been multi-casting or broadcasting four Standard Definition programs since the number of HD programs available to all stations was limited. As of January 6th OETA is excited to report we will be broadcasting one full time HDTV Channel and one SDTV channel. If we receive programs in HD from PBS we will broadcast them on our full-time HDTV Channel. In the spring OETA will be producing many of our local shows such as the nightly news report in HD…
“In the future you will see only 13.1 and 13.2 with the 13.1 being an HDTV Channel…
He goes on to say that the one remaining SD subchannel will be OETA OKLA.
R.I.P. OETA Kids and OETA You!
Well, that sucks. I really like OETA You, as a matter of fact, and I’m sure some parents won’t be thrilled at the end of the kids’ channle, either.
My kids loved PBS Kids. They are going to be extremely disappointed and won’t understand as they are 3 & 1.
If you have cable, it’ll still be there. This will only affect over the air programming and I’m sure they’ll have some of each on the subchannel they’re keeping.
In addition, the PBS HD channel carries a fair amount of children’s programming in HD.
It sounds like GREAT news! Sorry about the kiddie stuff but I prefer the HD channel and am exceedingly happy. I think Mr. Whiteman is quite right there are have been a number of childrens programing on the main channel so all should get something they like.
WOW! That’s great news.
And the nightly news will be in HD? That means the first local news broadcast in HD will be from OETA! I had assumed it would be KOKH.
Way to go OETA.
Ross Dixon in high definition. Finally!
Really though, this is fantastic news. As an OTA-only guy, I’ve really missed all their HD programming. Don’t have kids, so I couldn’t care less about the kids channel going away.
As of early morning they had one program on all channels then at 7:00 AM they have one letter-box program on two channels and a another program on the other two. So when I wonder does January 6th start for OETA. Or is this a sign the change over is not going smoothly? I finally turned it off and went back to the radio.
The 24/7 1080i HD channel at OETA-DT does make sense when comparing with other PBS stations. The Southern California area has 3 major PBS stations (24, 28, and 50) and all of them run an HD channel with an additional 2 or 3 SD channels simultaneously. The huge loss at this time for COX viewers is the change to the COX OETA-HD channel. The national PBS-HD feed is gone, replaced by the local OETA-HD 13.1 content.
OETA will no longer need to make transmission changes, so tuner problems should be history. While SD content will be a bit sharper with the 1080i transmission, I will miss the 24/7 national 1080i PBS-HD viewing on COX.
It is critical that OETA records the HD shows for retransmission at OETA’s schedule in HD ASAP. For example, Smart Travels was in SD today, but should be shown in HD. Since we no longer have the national 24/7 HD feed to view, it’s up to OETA to time shift the HD transmissions.
all I could find is a mostly out of date schedule and a mere handful of HD programs given. It comes out to business as usual with several HD or widescreen programs merely letterboxed. I failed to find the 24 hour HD feed because I did not know that PBS had discontinued it. I expected more; so I guess it all left me dissapointed that the whole day had one HD program. So why are they saying they are now a 24hr HD service? One hour of HD. A “full time” HD channel does not add up to 23hrs SD and 1 hour HD by my standards. Maybe there will be some nights they will do better. Dropping two PBS feeds must be more of a cost factor than an effort to actually provide a “full time HD channel.” Maybe they should rethink their schedule to reflect the HD feed from PBS. It was PBS that wanted to be exempt from simil. casting the analog and digital feed so they could “do more” with their HD. If this is it wow. It does not impress me that in the spring they will do HD from their studio while they carry SD handouts from yesterdays commercial stations news. Sorry for the vent.
Seems like mass confusion to me.
OETA must be run by a committee.
I noticed last night there was hd with no subchannel.
Last night they did okay; don’t know that they ever carried the ant. roadshow in HD before. During the day today I saw 4 subchannels again, we will see what they do tonight.
Fri well be an HD let down unless they have a way to start doing the movie night in HD.
If they do more like last night I will be nicer toward them.
Wow The newshour in HD looks great.
Bummer, this penalizes those who choose OTA. Please bring back OETA-you and PBS kids as this is the only quality family programming.
When they dropped the national PBS HD feed, that also penalized OTA viewers in favor of cable viewers. When this change was announced, I thought we’d be getting more HD content like we had before, but mostly now we just get the NewsHour, which is great, but not a substantial increase in the amount of HD that’s broadcast on a 24 hour basis.
Their schedules also aren’t right in that I still can’t figure out when to schedule the recording of Tavis Smiley, though I have guess and found out when Charlie Rose is rebroadcast in the middle of the night.
it seems like during the week they do better but Fri through Sun they fall flat on their face. One morning at 3:30 am they were carring a widescreen SD program rather than letter box it [meaning four black bars on a16:9 screen]. I was surprized but had no time to check out anything else because of getting ready to go to work.
Wonder why they keep showing the program titles for all the subchannels tho they are carrying only two actual channels. I would think they would shut the extra two down.