Why do locals look so bad ?

My locals are pretty good. Some via E* are better than I can get via antenna

mworks said:

I live in eastern, NC and the locals that dish provides look like someone used a set of $5 rabbit ears to get the signal. It really is that bad. One channel even has interference in it. The others are so blurry and low bandwidth that they are annoying to watch.

Click to expand...

Send an email to [email protected] and tell them the problems you are seeing. DISH uses subcontractors to pick up their locals and send them back to them. In our market they don't do a good job either and I have to complain about once a month (although lately I am watching the OTA HD feeds more and more; DISH does not call our HD locals via satellite).

It sometimes takes them a few days to fix interference problems. Low bandwidth is another issue and you might not get that solved but it doesn't hurt to tell them how bad your locals look.

Some of mine are horrid too, makes me cringe to see SD pics, and p1ssed more and more that E* can't get off their arse and get New Orleans locals in HD but D* does, wth!!!

Can someone explain this problem which has been lingering since 2006 for the NO market?

Same here locals are terrible but they are also about $3 above public access so I don't think they can get any better. Luckily I get HD channels as well and rarely watch the truly locals except for news a few times a week.

In many markets, including large ones, that's pretty much exactly what you're seeing - off-the-air NTSC broadcasts received via antenna and multiplexed into a fiber feed back to E*.

It costs money to have fiber feeds directly from stations, more money than the local subs bring in.

my area does not receive locals in hd. you should see my Fox feed---(the one that broadcasts the NFL games). it's like every cameraman is constantly smoking a big stogie!!! it's horrid. my other locals are tolerable (NBC is pretty bad though), but, the Fox feed just plain sucks!!!

i'm practically better off going upstairs and watching the Fox channel on my 26" sd tv---yet, it's sooo hard leaving my Sammy 46"er.

i contacted Dish about receiving locals in hd---they said there are no plans as of yet for this market to receive locals in hd, but, they would forward my request. yah, right.

There's nothing preventing you from putting up your own OTA antenna system adequate to receive your locals from. Now - if you live 70 miles from the stations / translatores - that may not help, but if you're within 50 miles of the transmitter antennas - it is not that bad to come up with an adequate reception system.

I think this issue has more to do with the networks than with dish, Dish can't do anything with a crappy signal from a local station, if they don't receive a quality signal they can't provide you with one either. the cheapest thing for a tv station is to broadcast is hd signals OTA.

Uhh - you do realize that the stations are NOT required to do HDTV, only digital ? Doing HDTV is NOT a cheap thing for a station to do, even if it is the only stream they broadcast. A station is perfectly within the law if all they do is their 1 480i SDTV program stream they have been doing all along. There is a shopping channel in my DMA that is doing just that. Most of the other stations ARE doing at least network HDTV, even if they can't afford to do locally produced HDTV (news, etc) programming yet. But I do get some locally produced news in HDTV - and it is wonderful !

i get the tallahassee DMA and it looks pretty bad too; the sound is mono. There's no HD availabe via dish either. I use an antenna and get flawless picture and sound.

SD loclas vary, HD locals OTOH are excellent!

Here in the Cleveland DMA, the "Big-4" SD locals look fine, but the PBS feeds (especially the more distant one from Akron) looks like they use an OTA antenna to receive the signal. On a windy day you can see the ghosts coming and going as the wind whips the antenna.

SD may also suffer from over-compression. I recall one day watching a Browns-Steelers game played in a blizzard in 3-Rivers Stadium (yes it was that long ago). The long shots were unwatchable as the compression tried to make sense of all the blowing snow.