No ESPN HD

[z500zag]

My friend that works for Dave says there are no plans to add ESPN HD to the lineup this spring. He said providers are prevented by law from charging more for HDTV. An HDTV channel takes up about 5 regular slots, so with no additional money for it, they are in no hurry to add more HDTV programming. He said Discovery HD will be the next addition. Yipee :-(

He also said they wanted to switch to MPEG4 encoding/decoding. I assume that would require new boxes though?? Doesn't seem possible to happen anytime soon.

[simian]

What does your fried do??? If he is a phone person they dony listen to what he says they are the last to find out any thing.... I was at CES and spoke to a couple of diferant reps and they said its not offical yet but they will be carring it. I would be live the reps at CES, because they are there to talk about all the new stuff coming out...

Simian
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"Better living thru modern, expensive electronics devices"

[z500zag]

I don't want to say, because there are only a few people in the company like him. He is definitely in the know. He has been right with a number of other things -- P4 card, H card turn off, merger called off (all of this was 6 months or more before it became official). He is in an organization that knows future plans.

He might be wrong, but I'll be shocked if he is. I was ribbing him pretty good that ESPN HD would not be carried immediately. He explained why it doesn't make sense right now. Hopefully Dish will pick it up, which will put some competitive pressure on Dave. But Dave knows he has all of the sports fans already. I'm sure the channel will come eventually, but I wouldn't expect it until the fall at the earliest.

[Ha!Ha!]

Maybe it's more to do with those cheap bastards at ABC than DTV. Notice how the NHL All-Star game isn't even in HD.

[z500zag]

Yeah, I saw the SuperBowl on two different big screens:
(1) ABC via DirecTv and
(2) ABC via local HDTV broadcast (in LA area).

The crappy ABC "HiDef" broadcast was virtually identical in quality to the non-HD. I can't believe the showcase event on TV can't be broadcast in true HD.


Unfortuately, it isn't Disney causing the no show of ESPN HD. It is a business decision for Dave. They can broadcast 5 channels of regular for each channel of HDTV. They make zero dollars more for broadcasting in HDTV. They are already limited in capacity. Given the choices of:
(1) put on more crappy cable channels that actually pay Dave to carry them
(2) include more local channel markets
(3) add more HDTV (after Discovery HD)

It doesn't look like (3) is much of a priority right now. HDTV just doesn't generate any profits yet. Adding more of it just throws away money. There are not that many digital sets out there in total. Of all the digital set owners, only a small fraction actually watch HDTV. It is just a DVD market right now, with a small fraction of power users that get HDTV.