Ben/Gabe: In addition to local affiliates broadcasting more hours per day, you should also consider that network news typically gets footage from news bureaus from all over the world, which may or may not be shooting in HD. So I think it's actually a much costlier transition to HD for the networks, not the affiliates.
With the affiliates, chances are that most of their content is homegrown, and so they can deliver a full HD broadcast.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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Ben/Gabe:
In addition to local affiliates broadcasting more hours per day, you should also consider that network news typically gets footage from news bureaus from all over the world, which may or may not be shooting in HD. So I think it's actually a much costlier transition to HD for the networks, not the affiliates.
With the affiliates, chances are that most of their content is homegrown, and so they can deliver a full HD broadcast.