Any chance of RTE News Now going HD?

zaphodbeeb

I mean - why not really given the space on the MUX.... and much of the news content is surely now in HD?

-ZB

Gerry Wicklow

I'm waiting for the day it goes SD :P

Atlantic Dawn

TV3 and TG4 would be far higher priority.

Sam Russell

This has all to do with the stupid bandwidth based charging system that has RTE paying two thirds of the costs of DTT with only one and half channels carrying adverts out of four channels of theirs and four others.

Scrap the charging system and make SD at 720 by 576 the basic standard. That would give a good PQ for those channels that remain SD.

An alternative would be for RTE to move to mux1 and let the others pay €6m for the other mux and splitthe costs between. Now since TV3, 3E and UTVi will all be under the same ownership, would that not make sense? They could all go HD for €1.5m each (inc TG4).

I]The costs of two muxes is €12m per year divided up by bandwidth used by each channel - encouraging the fuzzy vision we get from TV3.[/I

former total

1. Cost
2. No demand

Digifriendly

former total wrote: »

1. Cost
2. No demand

Regarding answer 2. No demand. Maybe I'm in a small minority here but I use RTE NEws Now quite a lot. I like the rolling news items that appear at the bottom of the screen and I think this is a pretty decent channel. Sky News is HD (although only on Sky) and BBC News is HD on all platforms so why not RTE News Now?

Gerry Wicklow

Sky is probably the only other FTA one that isn't HD yet. In fairness to RTÉ, News Now isn't too bad given it's budget/income of €0. (thanks minister)

Mearings

BBC News(201) is not HD on Virgin Media Ireland.
Channels (Horizon)
Channel Number RTE One HD 101 RTE Two HD 102 TG4 HD 104 Sky Sports News HD 438 UTV Ireland HD 110 BBC 1 HD 139 BBC 2 HD 140 Sky 1 HD 143 Sky Living HD 144 Sky Arts HD 145 Discovery HD 219 Sky News HD 232

Sam Russell

What could be done with RTE NN is to have a full screen news programme and a separate info screen with data display only either as a new channel (data only so low bw) or as a red button data service using MHEG 5.

dxhound2005

Digifriendly wrote: »

Regarding answer 2. No demand. Maybe I'm in a small minority here but I use RTE NEws Now quite a lot. I like the rolling news items that appear at the bottom of the screen and I think this is a pretty decent channel. Sky News is HD (although only on Sky) and BBC News is HD on all platforms so why not RTE News Now?

You are probably one of a small minority. People are moving away from viewing TV on ordinary televisions, and are happy to watch on tiny phone screens or tablets and laptops. Same with music, where the producers put a lot of effort into making high quality CD's, but a lot of people consume that using tiny earphones.

And much of what is on News TV these days comes from camera phones or Skype or Youtube. Something becomes more newsworthy for TV channels if there is interesting footage like Mrs Clinton collapsing or a police officer shooting a citizen. The fact that it is poor quality does not prevent the News channels running it over and over. Same with tsunamis and earthquakes, you get the same grainy footage repeated for hours, even days, without adding anything useful for the viewing public. Getting proper HD cameras to the scene is not practical in a lot of cases. And items sometimes make the TV news because there is some "citizen journalist" footage available, whereas they would never qualify for inclusion in a radio newscast.

I can live with news anchors only appearing in SD for the time being and the scrolling news being perfectly legible, if not pin sharp.