[BC] The place for OTA TV

[robertm]

It has very little to do with technical and everything to do with content. A lot of programming can tolerate substantial bit reduction while others do not. Live golf is degraded at even 13 megabits. Serious broadcasters that actually produce high quality content want to be competitive with other media in the 2 and 4K world and are loath to give away bits. It is  not like the early days where a CRT display was necessary to see full HDTV resolution and the Plasmas of the dAy were pretty blind. Other stations that mostly run rerun syndications can slice and dice the bits more freely. In both NY and LA CBS and NBC have two streams while most other O&Os run three except ION which seems to have standardized on six streams but then it doesn't take that many bits for Law and Order reruns and HSN. In neither market is a channel shared with another entity nor do I expect it in the future. The actual cost of running the transmitter is pretty trivial compared to a station's overall budget. 


> On Jul 20, 2014, at 2:16 PM, "Henry Ruhwiedel a9xw at cs.com.INVALID" <reader1 at oldradio.com> wrote:
> 
> Most stations are running multiple channels and some are even running multiple networks on one TX because some markets don't have enough RF channels or income to support 4 or more individual stations.  2 program channels is obsolete and technically naive.