I’m re-scanning the channels on my HDHomeRun tuner and discover that several channels are now missing. So far I’ve noticed WGN, WGNHD, CSPAN, CSPAN2 are completely gone while KSBI, CSPAN3, OKCOX03 among others are moved around. I wonder what they are up to?

• This topic was modified 90 days ago by  Taddeusz.

I thought I might give it a shot to ask if anyone on here is having glitchy reception of KFOR. My cable headend that I maintain has been having very intermittent signal levels of it for a few days now, and I thought it was just something wrong here. Today, however, I was in Hobart all day and was watching KFOR on their cable system (CableONE) and I noticed that they were having the exact same reception issues I was having in Carnegie. Basically, about every minute or so, the screen just pixellates and the audio garbles up for a second or two. Is anyone else out there seeing this or have any suggestions? Our cable headend antennas are 275 feet up and I’ve seen the same thing on both our yagi antennas and a parabolic UHF dish antenna, both located up that high.

Hello,
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As previously rumored, Cox added these 5 HD channels in Oklahoma City on 10-27-2009.

719 / ESPN News HD
751 / Fuse HD
764 / WE HD
773 / Disney XD HD
813 / Starz Edge HD

Kudos to Cox for making progress in catching up to the sats. Hopefully channels such as HDNet and HDNet movies will be added soon by Cox!

Is it even worth pointing out that KFOR has changed its schedule and apparently told no one? The “TV Schedule” link on KFOR.com links to Zap2it.com, which does not have the new “NewsChannel 4 at 4″ newscast. In fact, it still has the old schedule listed for the next two weeks, complete with new versions of shows no longer in those time slots.

Seriously, they’ve been semi-advertising this for a month and didn’t bother to update the program guide services? Where is Jeopardy now? Is it on once or twice a day? Does anything online have KFOR’s correct schedule? KFOR itself sure doesn’t.

KTUL finally made the switch this morning to HD for their news and studio programming. Looks like the field reporters are still using SD equipment.

You really have to get your shit together. You are in serious danger of replacing KFOR as the biggest joke in Oklahoma City media. Yes, KFOR—the station that buys syndicated segments like “Mr. Food” for the noon news but refuses to show the segment’s URL on screen, replacing it with the KFOR street address as if people who want more information are going to send a self-addressed stamped envelope. They haven’t figured out that using Google is easier than traveling back to 1975.

But I digress. First, let me state that you clearly did the right thing by breaking into broadcasting when there is a tornado warning in the over-the-air broadcast area. That is always justified, even if it pre-empts Oprah’s last show or the Super Bowl or whatever else.

The way you did it, however, was abysmally bad. I was watching because it hasn’t been the greatest week and I wanted to unwind by watching and keeping score for a baseball game. You were my only option, because when FOX Saturday baseball is on, it’s exclusive—no matter what package you buy from MLB or anyone else, your only choice during a FOX broadcast window is the FOX game, whether it’s one you want to watch or not. Rangers vs. Phillies was my last choice of the three games available, but there are lots of Rangers fans around here, so I understood.

I hope you understand how much you pissed them off tonight.

First, as you well know, you’re the only remaining OKC network affiliates (KOKH: Fox 25, and KOCB: The CW 34) who have not invested in the equipment to create, overlay, or rebroadcast HD video. Your excellent HD signals haven’t changed since about 2004, so when you have graphics to overlay, you drop into standard definition. It’s not bad SD like KFOR’s was, but it’s not great either. Just as KFOR has to learn it’s not 1975, you guys have to move beyond 2004 and start broadcasting local content—including weather graphics—in HD. We know the difference.

Second, the break-ins were just awful. In the first one, around the 3rd or 4th inning, there was just background noise and dead air for several seconds until the meteorologist started talking about the storms. I’m assuming she was a meteorologist, because even two hours of break-ins later, she never mentioned her name. In the first break-in, she said storms were moving to the north and east, and drew a storm tracker showing the storms moving south by southwest. She couldn’t pronounce the name of a town affected by the storm and said so.

As the game continued (for people in other markets, at least), we continually saw break-ins with increasingly useless information. After one or two pitches in an inning, you’d break in again with the Tornado Warning alert, and then tell us the same three things over and over. Miraculously, however, you always managed to say “we’re going to return you to programming” just as the innings ended and the commercials started. Much like the widely-known joke that is KFOR, this is trying to give the appearance of caring about viewers without sacrificing anything—except your viewers, who turn away because all they see is irrelevant information and ads. This is the age of the Internet. We can’t watch the game online but we can see pitch-by-pitch tracking and we know when the inning is ending just as clearly as you do. I think seven different times, you “returned to programming” just to catch ads, then broke in again after one or two pitches.

This might be OK if your break-ins were useful. They were not.

Although you seemed to have storm trackers in the field, we only occasionally saw video from them (until a short of an actual funnel late in the 8th inning), and never heard any sound. We don’t even know who was talking to us as there were no in-studio shots—just weather graphics. So each break went through a loop like this:

“There’s a tornado warning for [specific area], with potential funnels [here and here]. We’ll talk about that radar picture for a minute. Now we’ll show you Millenium and show that there’s a hail core, and talk about that for 30 seconds. This is all in the area of a larger severe thunderstorm warning, and that’s for this area. And there’s a larger tornado watch, shown as all these counties in green. But that includes a tornado warning for [specific area]…” (repeat until you turn off the TV in disgust)

No studio shots. No field reports. I guarantee you that anyone in the affected area turned to KFOR, KOCO, or KWTV after the first of these break-ins so they could get on-camera meteorologists, clear field reports, and HD images. Had this been in my area, no matter how much I wanted to watch baseball, I couldn’t have stayed with such useless information.

We saw about two consecutive half-innings in the last part of the game, and saw the top of the 9th for the end of the game, but that was all that was uninterrupted in favor of low-quality information. Not only that, but your weather graphics (the reason what baseball we saw was in SD) were way too dated. They alternated between the tornado warning and the much less important severe thunderstorm warning and tornado watch, so someone tuning in wouldn’t have figured much out — they’d see a small baseball picture letterboxed on four sides and tune away. Perhaps this is why you justified replacing most of the baseball game with information that could—and should—have been replaced by modern weather graphics in HD.

Remember, if your weather presentation is so annoying that you drive people away from your station (or to a cable channel), you’ve not only not performed a public service, you’ve performed a disservice. You want people to keep watching the game so that if something affecting a larger area (like Ada, or Shawnee, or OKC) crops up, you can warn them. When you do it this badly, you just make people stop watching altogether.

You can’t fix the graphics overnight because Sinclair is apparently too cheap to invest in their OKC properties and keep them up to date. You can, however, at the very least, do as much as possible to keep the weather information brief and relevant. Don’t drop out of HD to show irrelevant graphics. Don’t pre-empt programming to show low-quality break-ins with no new information, no on-camera personalities, and no field reports. Don’t “return us to programming” just for the ads, because we’re not that stupid. We know what you’re doing, and we stop watching your channel.

Break in during the commercials, update us quickly, and if necessary, send us to KOCB 34 for continuous coverage since you have the luxury of doing that. According to the schedule, KOCB had only reruns of Seinfeld and Two and a Half Men on tonight—incorrectly identified as in HD, when all of us here know KOCB does not broadcast any syndicated programming in HD, and we also know that Seinfeld was not recorded in HD. You could have had the best of both worlds with brief KOKH break-ins and whatever KOCB coverage you wanted, but you did it exactly backwards.

This is why, when I have a chance to decide to watch local programming, I vastly prefer KOCO. They do it in HD. They don’t break in capriciously. They break in over commercials for sports or prime-time programming unless it’s a tornado warning, and even there they keep the broadcast full of relevant, changing information.

I have a choice next Saturday as to whether I watch baseball in primetime, or do something else at night and watch baseball in the afternoon. Guess which option I’m going to choose? Guess whether I’m the only one who feels this way?

You guys need to get your shit together. Boobery like this can’t be excused by your beautiful and stable HD images from the networks.

Came back home from Thanksgiving at the parents and found out that my HD local channels from Suddenlink have stopped working. Survivor didn’t record last wednesday night, so I know it’s been down since then – anyone else having trouble?

Was KOCO 5 news in HDTV?

I was watching tv last night and saw a commercial from cox talking about changes that are being made to the OnDemand service and all of this is coming in September

the link to the forums is not on the main page anymore… was this intentional? or if not, was it moved and i just can’t find it? i guess it’s not a really big deal, i just have to manually type it in the address bar, but i am lazy. anyways. figured i would ask and see

Read the press release courtesy of Engadget.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/10/cox-plus-package-brings-advanced-trio-ui-500gb-multiroom-dvr/

Looks like multi-room DVR with bigger drives and better programming. SDV looks like it’s coming too.

Per KOCO today:

http://www.koco.com/news/23633190/detail.html

OKLAHOMA CITY — Crews are atop the KOCO-TV tower on Friday working to bring down its old analog antenna and are just days away from installing a new digital antenna.

That digital antenna will extend KOCO-TV reception to parts of central Oklahoma that have had a hard time receiving the station’s signal since the analog-to-digital switchover in 2009.

The work on Friday is preliminary, according to KOCO-TV chief engineer David Evans.

Evans explained that on Friday, a crew of four will do some preparatory work to stabilize the antenna before using a cutting torch to begin the removal process. Once that process begins, it constitutes a “point of no return,” he said, and the analog antenna will come down.

The next step after that, which will not happen on Friday, is to install the digital antenna. With good weather, that could happen next week.

Visit KOCO.com for updates and live video feeds as this process continues.

Has anyone else noticed that KOPX is now registering as HD Standard when you watch it OTA? I had read some time ago that ION was working through its network getting local outlets ready to broadcast in HD. Will we be seeing KOPX HD on Cox’s HD lineup in the near future? Does this development mean we will be seeing more syndicated HD programs OTA in Oklahoma? Or am I dreaming?

They are:
Style HD on Channel 765 (oh)
Fox Soccer HD on Channel 702 (Yeah)

Plus SWRV on channel 900 (whatever that is)

Cox is inching ever closer to the magical 100 real full time HD channels lineup that all cable providers talk about and most fudge when talking about the actual total they carry. Dish and DirecTV are constantly in a verbal food fight over how many HD channels they carry.

Am I the only one who has this problem? It’s been going on for over a year.

Almost every night when watching any program on the CW, there will be times when the audio will cut out for a few seconds and be replaced by a loud burst of static noise. I am an AT&T U-Verse subscriber and also have an HTPC connected to a rooftop antenna. My brother is a Cox subscriber. This problem exists through all three connections and can be confirmed through recordings that the issue occurs at the exact same time regardless of how the signal is delivered to the TV. Before everything went digital, I’m pretty sure it only existed on KOCB-DT, not the analog feed.

I contacted their engineering department through http://www.cwokc.com last May. At first they said I was the only person who has ever reported this issue and suggested I might have some kind of interference in my house. After pointing out my brother has the same issue 5 miles away using a different cable provider, they asked for specific times that this occurs. After providing the requested information, I never heard from them again. I didn’t watch much CW last summer, so I didn’t really worry about it, but when the new TV season started back in the fall, I tried to contact them again through their website…this time with no answer at all.

Since the issue is still occurring and seems to have gotten worse, I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this, or knows of a better way to get KOCB’s attention.

Hallmark Channel HD will be on Channel 769 in OKC and most likely Tulsa.
Epix HD will be located on Channel 798 and Epix will be on Channel 211 as part of the Cox Advanced TV Movie Pak.

As has been the rule of late, this information is located on the March billing cycle statements under “News from Cox.”

If you are interested in checking this out, here are the links:
ww2.cox.com/myconnection/oklahomacity/home.cox and look for “Watch The Masters in 3D”
“Learn more–>” then “More details on getting ready for 3DTV” The information is specific to Samsung and Panasonic models.

The specifics of most interest are that the broadcasts will occur on April 7,8,9.10 and 11. HDMI 1.4 and 3D glasses/goggles that work with Sumsung and Panasonic are required. The real bummer: 3D-Ready TVs purchased before February 2010 will not support the HDMI 1.4 specification and will not work for the Masters broadcasts. So says the Cox website.

I’m not sure when it happened but KFORDT, KFORDT2, KOCODT, and KOCODT2 are currently available on two separate clear QAM channels in the OKC area, 84 and 116. Previously they were only on channel 84. I wonder if Cox is planning on moving those from 84 to 116 and they are keeping both alive until the change is permanent?

It’s been the usual mix of usefulness and severe overreaction, hasn’t it? I flipped by KFOR and noticed that somehow they’d managed to “enhance” their snow-closing graphic so that it still covered the top 10%-20% of the picture despite being reduced in size. With these guys it’s always “One step forward, one step backwards and eat a jar of paste.”

KFOR pre-empted its entire daytime schedule (programs they have to pay to air) for live remotes of people standing outside in freezing rain, but I think they went ahead with NBC’s prime-time schedule (programs NBC pays them to run), continuing with the philosophy of looking like they’ll sacrifice to get you severe weather coverage without actually sacrificing much. (That is, if you ignore 4-2, the “4Warn Forecast” channel that they must spend thousands of dollars per month to beam over the air and which is less useful than a Weather web site. It had nothing about the current weather situation all day long. Honest to god, if they’re not going to have anything but automatic content on there, why bother? Did the thing have more than 5 viewers during the entire month?)

KOCO ran ABC’s prime-time schedule and replaced the commercials with its weather updates, actually sacrificing money and keeping viewers entertained. Didn’t watch KWTV.

Tonight, I’m hoping that KOKH and KOCB (the only two network affiliates who can’t superimpose graphics on HD yet) will let the new first-run HD series episodes (Smallville, Kitchen Nightmares) run in HD and update at the commercials, especially since everyone has plenty of ways to find out what might be closed tomorrow after 9PM on those two channels. Wishful thinking?

Conan’s 18-34 demographic is growing daily, there’s no bigger story in entertainment…

…so be sure to not show the beginning of his monologue, the part everyone wants to see, so that you can show crappy SD video of a fire that’s not doing anything, followed by a minute of useless studio banter (and more Mike Morgan!) and three minutes of local commercials that you didn’t show at the right time, so you decide to show them over the one thing everyone wants to see.

It’s not like I was going to watch Jay Leno ever again after this crap, but after Conan actually came to KFOR to do promos and you to pull this chickenshit stuff?

This is why we can’t have nice things. You just screw them up.

For the record, KFOR joined The Tonight Show in progress five minutes late, just exactly as Conan finished talking about the late-night imbroglio. We missed the biggest entertainment story of the year so you could show a fire not doing anything plus studio banter plus commercials that you should have skipped because you didn’t run them at the right time. You made bad choices and we don’t get to see the hottest thing on television. Good job!

We knew NBC was completely screwed, but are all NBC affiliates this bad as well?

It looks like Jay is back in his own time slot at 10:30. Conan maybe going to Fox?

I recently went up to AMC to watch a movie with the Mrs. we usually drive to Moore but didn’t feel like it so I thought what the heck I will go to AMC since it’s closer and we were only going to see christmas carol. Anyway when I got there I was surprised to see that the AMC now has two screens that are DLP and then the IMAX digital screen. We saw New Moon on one of the DLP screens and it looked really good. Then we decided to try out the IMAX and see Christmas carol in 3D. It was pretty impressive, I think the most impressive thing about it was the trailer for Avatar. I was surprised in the depth, color and clarity of the picture. Anyway I am at least glad that AMC is trying to upgrade their theater now. Now unless I just want the balcony treatment I can just drive two miles to AMC and see a movie on DLP, if it happens to be playing on one of them.

The December billing cycle statements list the following new channels under “News From Cox”

Tennis Channel HD on Channel 729
Investigation Discovery HD on Channel 761
BBC America HD on Channel 764

All three should be activated “by December 31st.” I assume this information applies to both Tulsa and OKC Cox systems.

I noticed today that KSBI-DT 51.3 now has banners on both sides of the screen saying “DSBI-DT Thunder TV” and that 51.4 looks a bit sharper. Am I behind in noticing this development for the first time?