Sunday, March 1, 2009

TV







Across the board on the television pages, I am seeing TV stations listed with their digital channel, and so far just about all of them have been incorrect. In the US, all TV stations are digitially defined using their ANALOG channel and sub channel. For example, if you have a station on analog channel 12 and digital 13, the ONLY digital channels will be 12.1, 12.2, etc. Putting "13.1", "13.2" is incorrect as in the legal scheme of digital tv in the US, this channel doesn't actually exist. The only spot the digital channel number exists is on the license, like with US FM radio. It is used as a reference for which set of frequencies the station will use to transmit their digital signal. The PSIP data (Program Service Information Protocol) is required by FCC law to "map" to the station's analog channel. (All FM Frequencies are assigned a channel number from 200 - 300). When these digital channel boxes were put on the TV profile pages, they should have only listed the analog channel (which is known as the "major" channel) and the appopriate minor channels (the .1, .2). I've corrected the ones Ive run across so far, but the rest need to be corrected before confusion sets in about the station's digital.

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