We got a nice little Christmas present from DirecTV last night. They have begun to broadcast our local TV stations in High Definition. This is a big deal for us because we don’t watch very many TV shows if they are in standard definition any more. It’s just not as enjoyable.
Living in the country, we actually get our local stations from Tucson, AZ, the largest city in our vicinity. Tucson is considered a small market for television. It took a long time for them just to get DirecTV to carry their local stations. When DirecTV recently launched a bunch of satellites in preparation for many, many more HD channels, they also planned to start converting the non-local HD channels to HD. Again, Tucson would not be on the early list.
When the satellites went operational a month or two ago, we were hopeful that we would be a year or so away from getting our locals in HD. Now, we have been able to get waivers for all channels but NBC and thus get the HD “locals” from Los Angeles. However, the timing is not always convenient and its not local programming.
We were pleasantly surprised last night to already see that they had turned on our local channels in HD. Now we can start watching NBC again. Is there anything any good on NBC? We can also save a few bucks and cancel our National network feeds since they will be largely duplicated for prime time programming.
Thanks DirecTV! And Merry Christmas to you too!
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