1. The station has turned over a new leaf, actually cares about presenting a quality HD picture, and will continue to upgrade and invest in HD going forward, or

2. They’ve had Mike Morgan tied to a chair during his off-air hours for the past two weeks, assuring him that as soon as the Olympics are over, he’ll be able to get back to his little red button and pull the premiere of Heroes off the air with live streaming coverage of a stiff breeze in Amarillo.

Given that during the closing ceremony, KFOR dropped the HD picture into its still-crappier-than-anyone-else’s SD for twenty minutes for absolutely no discernible reason (no weather maps, no local break-ins, no crawls, nothing—just no HD), I’d set the odds of the above two scenarios at 50-50.

NBC doesn’t do anything to rein them in, apparently. (NBC has its own issues. Why are the Olympic commercials for “Deal or No Deal” in HD but the show itself is not?)

So I have a suggestion for KFOR. Drop the “4″ logo and use the equipment generating the channel 4 logo to put a HD weather map on the HD feed when there are tornado warnings in the state.

Above all. I really appreciate the quantity of great HD during the Olympics and pray that no local storms occur for the rest of the coverage! It reminds me of the 24/7 HD coverage we had during the 2002 Winter games on KFOR.

“Let the world take note: at 11:01 PM on August 15, 2008, KFOR-DT superimposed its own channel logo (in full color) over the HD picture.”

I noticed that, too, on Sunday night so maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for KFOR yet!

Let the world take note: at 11:01 PM on August 15, 2008, KFOR-DT superimposed its own channel logo (in full color) over the HD picture.

That is, unlike four comments ago, the station did not drop out of HD just to run its “NewsChannel 4″ logo and call letters at the top of the hour.

Of course, last night, they dropped out of HD for 3 minutes to show a crawl telling you that you might need a converter in February 2009. A crawl on the HD channel. That went all the way across the 16:9 screen. So they took it out of HD to run a crawl in 16:9 that anyone seeing it in 16:9 did not need because they already have the equipment.

That’s been par for the KFORse. (oooh.) But tonight, a full-color super-imposed HD logo without dropping to SD. I hesitate to imagine “hope” where KFOR has so often dashed hopes before, but one never knows.

The Tonight Show won’t be on until the Olympics are over, but it’s cheaper to pay someone to make the graphic once and use it when it’s wrong than it is to pay for the capability to do something right.

If you’re still waiting for KFOR to get its act together, don’t hold your breath. They make plenty of money doing it all wrong and ignoring you.

NBC’s olympic coverage was scheduled to run through 11:30 PM. Apparently, that’s just way too late for the gentle souls at KFOR. They recorded the news at or around 10:00 PM and just played the tape. With an OU gymnast competing for a medal, his watch party was their lead story—recorded about an hour before the results were known. The sportscast didn’t know the results either, just said they were “competing” for a medal.

It was scheduled to be on the air until 11:30 and they couldn’t hang around to do the news at 11:30.

The sad thing is that they’ll get ratings by default because people didn’t turn away at 10PM to watch news on the other channels, so they’ll take this as “confirmation” that they don’t need to do anything right. Once again, NBC hits a home run and KFOR thinks it did all the scoring.

Dennis

It’s nuts that a major network station in a good-size market hasn’t had this capability in place before now. The owners must be real tightwads.