HDTV listings: where are they?
By Kevin C. Tofel 
posted Aug 28th 2005 11:34AM
posted Aug 28th 2005 11:34AM
I'm sitting here going through my weekend ritual of reading the newspaper over coffee and I've finally had it. I only read the weekend edition of my paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, simply because I get most of my news from on-line sources. On the weekends, I view items such as the weekly ad circulars, the editorials and the TV listings section. It's the listings that has me annoyed and I can't imagine it's just me that's fed up. Where are the HDTV listings?I'm not picking on my local paper here. I suspect that very few print listings actually indicate what shows are available in high-def. Why is that? We're well into our transition to digital television at this point. Sure, we might be a little behind and we definitely have some issues surrounding tuners and equipment, but the broadcast stations are making the move to digital. If that's the case, why aren't the listings moving along with them?
Maybe it IS just my local paper that doesn't point out the HD and digital broadcasts. I know you'll let tell me if that's the case. In the meantime, I'll do what you do and rely on our limited, but informative daily posts entitled "What's on HDTV today". You can view these daily posts in our Programming category and even subscribe to them with our Programming RSS feed.
Let us know if your local paper provides digital or HD listings in the comments. I hope to see them soon in my paper or I might have to change my weekend ritual. I'd hate to do that because going from "newspaper and coffee" to just "coffee" turns my weekend ritual into my weekday ritual.
My paper doesn't either, but I get my HD listings from TitanTV.com. Check it out if you haven't, I set mine to show all the OTA digital channels I can get, and it even shows a little HD logo on the programs that are in high-def. Good times.
Ken, TitanTV is a good tip for those who don't know about it. I've used it for the past three years myself. Print media, however, needs to stop wondering why they will get trounced by on-line media. They simply aren't keeping up with the times and aren't helping to support our transition to digital TV. At least my paper isn't! :)
I'm pretty sure that newspapers get their TV listings from just a few sources. So it's really the creators of this television data that need to be targeted. Tribune Media Services (tms.tribune.com/) comes to mind.