Huntsville, AL - HDTV - Page 90

Negotiations may have fell through.

Would you rather them add those channels anyway and just compress the hell out of them? Cable HD is already subpar, I wouldn't want to see it made any worse.

Correct - WHIQ is staying on channel 10, which gives us one less 6 MHZ slot for HD than previously planned. I'm told we're holding on Lifetime Movie HD and Lifetime HD.

-g

So WHIQ is staying on channel 10 and Government Access is not moving there from 42. 42 is where History was moving (from 26, which is where ABC Family was moving from 66). What will be the new lineup change?

Why not just move Gov Access to digital 155 (where WHIQ was going), freeing up the same number of analog slots as before?

Can't move Gov to a digital only channel. 10 is staying put, 42 is staying put and History is moving to 64. All other changes are still scheduled to occur on the 27th - except for the addition of Lifetime Movie HD and Lifetime HD.

-g

.....and, based on my bill insert, WHDF-HD is being added (Ch. 907) in place of CNBC HD.

Knology added the new HD channels this morning....except for Biography, Comedy Central, and ESPNews, which apparently will not be added.

C'mon, Knology, stop promising and then not delivering!!!

Why do you say "which apparently will not be added"? Do you have some source for that, or are you basing it on them not working yet? The day is not yet done. I was up late last night (watching a crazy Braves game), and it appeared that changes were being done incrementally, not all at once (I saw some analogs moved around, but not all of the announced changes, and a couple of new HDs, but not most).

There are no listings for them in my DVR's program guide (when I try to punch up the channel number, nothing happens), and, they are not included in the newly revised channel lineup on Knology's website. Also, I noticed that C-SPAN was not relocated from channel 40 to digital preferred, as they previously announced.

Now that I'm home, I'm seeing the same thing. On the analog side, CSPAN stayed on 40 and MTV moved to 65. I'm not seeing Biography HD (935), Comedy Central HD (957), ESPNews HD (979), or E! HD (954).

Oddly, for 954, my TiVo has a mapping (489MHz PID 0xB1), but I don't actually get anything.

This morning, E! HD (954) has actual content.

The Knology additions are very welcome. Also WZDX-54 is now originating local content (syndicated shows and some commercials) in HD. Wonder when WAFF will get off the stick and finish their HD upgrade? Wheel of Fortune has been produced in HD for years and we can't see it in Huntsville.

Don't get me wrong; I welcome what Knology did end up adding. I'm frustrated that there appears to be some management and/or marketing issues that caused us to only get 16 of the promised 22 new channels (and those changes were communicated poorly or not at all). I hope we don't have to wait another two years (with big price hikes in between) for more HD channels.

Burdellgp, couldn't have said it better....my sentiments exactly!

The Braves are supposed to be on SportsSouth (HD 987, SD 23). I see them on SD, but 987 is just a blank screen. My TiVo is seeing a signal on 681MHz pid 0xCA, there's just no content. It looks like something at the head-end is not transmitting the SportsSouth signal.

Looks like somebody rebooted something and got it back. I lost the analog feed for a brief time, and a few minutes later the HD feed came back as well.

Thanks to gcrawford I expect (even if you just passed it along). That's why, despite my HD frustrations, I'm still with Knology.

Also noticed only green digital artifacts on ESPNU (Ch. 980). Think it's been on there most of the day now.

Nice to see WAAY is finally going HD on their local newscasts. Anyone have a calendar date for this? The promos are not specific.

Question; we're using knology out in madison (city), and I just got a new bedroom TV (yay!). upon scanning for channels, it found various ones like 64-xyz or somethingorother, and it's SyFyHD, or DiscoveryHD or something like that. However, my Tivo box in the other room only of course has guide data for the 901-905 channels.

Realistically, why doesn't Knology map all their unencrypted HD channels in the same 90x block so that those of us with Tivos can utilize our guide data? I'm getting along just fine with expanded basic plus the unencrypted HD channels carried. Frustratingly however, of those unencrypted, I can only really conveniently record 901-905 because of the guide data issue.

I'd be all over cable cards if I could just rent a cable card for $4.95/mo. But no, I tried that- they charged me out the wazzoo for all these digital cable packages and what-not. No matter how hard I fought, they insisted their billing system CANNOT be setup to charge me just the cable-card rental fee if I'm not already on a digital service.

I know none of this is knology's "FAULT." But there seem to be ways around it, such as 901-905 mappings that work beautifully with the Tivo..

Grumble grumble!
..dane

The other HD channels are normally encrypted, so there's not much point in them providing PSIP mappings. When you see one or more not encrypted, it usually means that Knology replaced some equipment and it just isn't currently set to encrypt (I think this sometimes happens when something breaks and they put in a temporary replacement).

Reminds me of the first days of expanded cable in the '80s... we bought cable-ready TV's but the cable systems still made us use their inferior boxes to get any channel beyond 13. Why encrypt the HD channels anyway? Cable companies, do something nice for your subscribers... let us scan our TV's and get all the HD channels.

WTZT-11 flash cut to digital.

They have 4 subchannels - all showing the same thing - RTV programming as of 5:45pm 09/20/2011.

Their transmitter is on Capshaw Moutain.

Well, HD has cost them truckloads of money, and they recoup it by charging extra for that service. If they don't encrypt them, people will figure it out, and nobody would pay extra, so they'd have to raise rates across the board to cover HD. Now, many providers have apparently decided they've recouped enough (or they spread it across a large enough customer base now) that they don't charge extra for HD, but not Knology.

Or rather, they don't charge extra for HD, but you have to have their converter box for digital tiers and HD, which runs some ungodly fee. Dunno what the box fee is on Knology, but I've seen $7-14/month on other carriers like Time Warner, Comcast and Mediacom.

Knology charges for HD service ($9.95/month), and that fee is just for the service. Any necessary equipment is extra (so I pay $1.95/month for a CableCard for example).

Thanks for the heads up - I'll try and catch them the next tropo morning.

From my locale, their signal is currently just as strong as WAFF, bouncing from 0-6dB

That makes sense. Thanks for that.


Really? They were charging me $20/mo adder on top of my existing expanded basic (analog) just for "basic HD" package, and then an additional $4.95 for a cable-card; PER CARD. Since I have a TivoS3 (the 1st gen HD Tivo), I need two cards, even if they're Mcards. So I'm looking at a $30/mo. adder. Once I got my first bill (after the installer assured me they wouldn't do it that way), I had to jump through hoops to get it back the way I had it before (expanded basic package).

I would be all over a reasonable cablecard charge, if that's all I was paying.



..dane

The $9.95/month for HD requires you to already have the "Digital Preferred" service, so if you only have analog, it would be more. I don't know why the CableCard fee would be different though. However, since you had two, Knology charges the HD package fee on a per-device basis (it is $9.95 per device capable of decoding the channels), although I think they discounted it some for the sole case of two CCs in the original TiVo Series3.

There's been a couple of times when I've considered picking up a second TiVo (when they were discounted), but another $11.90/month to Knology quickly stopped that thought. The next-gen TiVo is supposed to record 4 channels, but it is most likely going to be digital-only, so not much use on Knology if you ever want to record a channel they don't offer digital or HD.

It seems the installers (or at least the one I've dealt with) knows tons about tivos and cc's and the like, but the billing department I don't think has a clue.

Since I only have expanded basic, I would certainly entertain paying a reasonable fee for some CC's for HD channel mapping. That's all I need them for. I don't have any plans to pay for premium channels, I just need it for channel mapping their existing channels. Oh well.

At least channels 901-905 are mapped to channels 901-905, or something like that- I can tell Tivo to use the digital lineup (that I'll get cc's later) and poof, channels 901-905 (the free broadcast channels) have guide data for them and everything. But that's it.

..dane

Anyone using MediaCom in the Monrovia area? I'm about to dump DirecTV and begin renting a M-Card for $1.99/mo instead of their $10.50/mo DVR box... sure, I'll have to buy the HDHomeRun Prime for my MediaPortal based HTPC, but this is part of a migration away from AT&T/DirecTV.