ION scared off by the DTV transition, postpones debut another month
By Steven Kim 
posted Feb 19th 2009 8:20AM
posted Feb 19th 2009 8:20AM
Seriously, ION, this is getting ridiculous. With a healthy dose of spin, ION TV is delaying its planned February 16 HD launch by a month so it will not coincide with the confusion around the DTV transition. We'll admit that the state of the analog shutoff is a real mess, but somehow we think that any money-making enterprise would want to sweep in with advertiser-loved HD content to put before viewers' eyes. Anyhow, the service is now planning to pull the HD trigger in 20 markets on March 16, and then 25 more markets on what we assume will be perfectly normal, nonconfusing days later in the year.EDIT: reworked a murky sentence for clarity.
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"any money-making enterprise would want to sweep in with HD content and sign up customers sooner rather than later; you know, before people discover a little something called OTA HD or decide DTV is just fine for them, HD or not."
Trying to follow this logic hurts by brain. Maybe it's too early for me this morning.
Agreed. I do not understand that sentence at all. Will ion be going HD OTA, or is this article just stupid?
Ion's is a OTA network they don't have to sign up customers, just advertisers that they already have. Research before you criticize.
I don't follow any of this logic, EHD's or ION's.
ION can launch HD whenever it wants. It doesn't have to wait for mandatory DTV.
Meanwhile, "any money-making enterprise" somehow implicitly "wants" to make their own HD content because DTV exists is also complete nonsense.
From what I've seen of ION, it essentially does nothing more than rerun old TV shows and movies. ION doesn't really have any content of its own, and the introduction of HD isn't going to change that. From a technical standpoint, ION probably shouldn't go HD immediately, not unless they have access to the original film copies of the content they show and are willing to invest the time and money into reframing them for 16:9 and then digitally remastering them at a higher resolution.
Now, before anyone goes "But hold on, this was stuff for TV", most of it is on film, and this process is already being done - for example Everyone Loves Raymond has had exactly this process applied to it and is being broadcast by... er, TBS I think. (Higher definition doesn't make it any funnier though, alas.) And a lot of TV was filmed for 16:9 even if it was broadcast as 4:3, which is why if you buy DVDs of popular series' like The Pretender, it's all 16:9.
But... but it's EXPENSIVE. Very expensive. And it may well be premature to do this now, especially when there are benefits in NOT going HD. If all you're broadcasting is reruns, there's a strong argument for staying SD, and using the transition to add a bunch of extra SD channels.
So the notion that "any money-making enterprise" - even assuming we're referring to "profitable TV networks" rather than "/any/" - has the production of HD content as being in its best interest is clearly false. An enterprise that makes its money from rebroadcasting old SD content has little to gain and a lot to lose by going HD.
What is ION? I never heard of this channel
A network that used to be PAX. It's a quasi-religious national network that largely broadcasts reruns of "wholesome" TV shows, from Quantum Leap to Drew Carey. (I don't understand that selection either.) Their DTV service in my area is augmented by a secondary "ION Life" channel, a childrens cartoons channel called Qubo, and worship station, all apparently run by ION.
One wonders if they'll be able to keep the other three channels going if they do switch the main channel to HD.
15 hours of "Paid Program" and I can't watch it in HD now! Darn! My day has just gone dark. What ever will I do not having a channel in HD that doesn't do anything but show infomercials?
It a infor ad channel that shows some old TV shows mix with Christian teaching. It started off as PaxTV for the name of the guy that founded it. The guy founded The Home Shopping Network
It was also known as Worship TV where it played Worship music at night with verses. They still have Worship TV because my friend got a DTV converter and it was one of the channels. I guess it is only on free iovver the air tv.
I live in the DFW area and get OTA HD, ION has about 4 digital channels here which are all SD, I have seen some of that film to HD on Sienfield here. I think it looks great, I would think that most everything will be going to this route once HD really takes hold. I'm thinking in the next 5 years.
They probably figure that the station engineers have enough crap to deal with, so why make them deal with their HD launch when they're already busy changing plans or making the switch...