This question was sent to us prior to the chat but we thought more would benefit from it. Enjoy! Q: You are right about quality on G3. Depending on content, the artifacts can get pretty bad. I remember seeing the Conventions on MSNBC. The confetti was killing the signal. Every pixel on the screen changed for 20 seconds. There is no way the buffer is big enough to handle that. But I also noticed that there were analog artifacts on the digital signal (dot crawl above the graphics). Is it possible that your tech guys can use component or even S-video as the output of the receiver and input to the encoder? Are you using stat-mux on the signal? That helps a lot. Is it possible to do a direct digital to digital conversion. That helps a lot, too. A: We receive each programmers signals on a commercial satellite receiver where the signals are output analog and then converted to digital to feed into an older Motorola DCII system. Unfortunately we don't have the ability to keep the signals in the original digital format. The Motorola encoder system is utilizing stat muxing. This Motorola encode system has very little pre processing to help with the inbound signals and that have already been compressed by the programmers. We do plan on making a modulation change in March that will increase the amount of information rate available for the stat-mux to allocate more data to each channel which will improve the macro blocking that you are seeing. Most of the macro blocking occurs at the minimum data rate setting. which we should be able increase when we have additional throughput from the modulation changes. Please feel free to give us feed back once we make these changes in early March. |
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| moderator | Thanks for joining us today. We will be starting momentarily. |
| moderator | We would like to begin with your questions. |
| microgodfather | will nps ever have all the movies on w5 in one of their packages? |
| mike_mountford | Do you mean all of the movie channels? |
| SDphoto | Here I sit all broken hearted. Tuned to ESPN and it departed |
| mike_mountford | Bummer. ESPN is my favorite channel too. |
| Darrell | Any idea why NPS charges an uplink fee for Starz, Hbo, etc? Even such added charges to such as the Denver 8 seems to be overboard - Wal-Mart does not charge customers a "checkout fee" nor does my favorite gas station charge a parking fee when I buy his gasoline. |
| mike_mountford | Yes, I do know. Without the uplink fee, we would not be able to uplink the 13 or so channels that we uplink now. These are core channels, without which there would not be a C-band industry to speak of. So in essence, what we are doing is to help the industry continue to survive. |
| microgodfather | yes |
| mike_mountford | In regards to the movie channels on W5, we sell HBO, Starz, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel all a-la-carte and that is the way people would like it so we haven't felt the need to package them. We have also kept the price so low on the a-la-carte that we could not generate a savings on a package. |
| microgodfather | where can i find someone in the Memphis, Tn area that works on big dishes? |
| mike_mountford | We will refer that question to our dealer coordinator who would be the best person to answer it. Unfortunately, she is out this week. If you need someone sooner than that, please email John at jferguson@allamericandirect.com. He may be able to help. |
| SDphoto | OK. Any chance of gett Fox Business? |
| mike_mountford | Only if we decide to add it, which will increase prices in the Absolute Digital and Digital Essentials pacakges. That is how Fox requires us to package it. At this point, we have decided to keep the prices down rather than add more programming. |
| Darrell | But Mike, there are other program providers who DO NOT add uplinking fees for subscriptions to Starz, etc! Please be specific.. |
| mike_mountford | Those other program providers don't uplink anything. They simply cash customer's checks and are proud of saying that. We have tried hard to keep C-band going for the betterment of all subscribers and the uplink is absolutely necessary. |
| 4dtv | I heard NPS willl be changing the symbol rate and FEC on the G3 channels for abetter picture when will this happen. |
| mike_mountford | Let me refer you to the chat log that we will post to the website following the chat. Our engineer will be addressing that very concern. |
| Darrell | I have an NPS bill for $138.26 for Starz PLUS $13.36 uplink fee!!!!! |
| mike_mountford | Yes, of course you do. We know that. If you want to continue to have the availability of C-band programming, I suggest you pay it. You could buy Starz from the other guys and if everyone did that, we would pull down our uplink feeds and you would see how quickly the C-band industry went away. I would think it would take but two months. |
| microgodfather | thank you |
| Lobo | Any news on The Weather Channel on 4DTV? |
| mike_mountford | No, I need to contact the Weather Channel again. The last I heard, they were struggling to get a deal done with Motorola, but I thought that would be done by now. I apologize, but I need to follow-up. |
| GHS | Hi Mike: I would like to know if the tier bits paid to Motorola are like one time payments or are paid at different times of the year and how much money is spent on such payments? |
| mike_mountford | Wow. That is very proprietary business to business information, which we are under non-disclosure in our contract to Motorola. Therefore, I can not disclose it. Why would you like to know such things. |
| rjaguirre@utla.net | What are the chances that NPS will go Chapter 11, Charter cable in so. cal announced a couple of days ago? |
| scottiedo | |
| mike_mountford | WOW! Your questions are getting really off the wall, but I can answer that. The changes are slim to none. We have other businesses in addition to C-band which help us weather the storm during this economic crisis. |
| GHS | Mike, this is problem with the Weather Channel not on C-Band in digital Digicypher format for C-band because who is suppose to pay the tier bits, either Motorola OR NBCUniversal because they own the Weather channel now and they say they are not suppose to pay for thes tier bits so that it the reason for the question. |
| mike_mountford | Great! That is good news. I will call my contact at NBCUniversal and we will see what we can figure out. For the fellow who keeps questioning the uplink fee,one of the things that we do is to pick up many of the tier bit feeds, like the Eeather Channel, just to make sure that they stay on C-band. The revenue is such that they don't want to pay the cost of the tier-bits, but we blend that in to the thing that we call the uplink fee. Maybe we should call it the "uplink/tier-bit/and other things that keep C-band alive" fee or else many of these channels would have dropped by now. |
| rjaguirre@utla.net | What is NPS doing to improve the pix quality on G3 especially for TNT? |
| scottiedo | |
| mike_mountford | Again, please check the chat log that we will post. Read the note from our engineer. |
| rjaguirre@utla.net | I miss the analog pix on G5 as compared to the signals on G3. |
| Lobo | Thank you NPS for keeping C-Band alive. Please extend my thanks to STAN3006 and JOHNCALLNPS, who are always there to keep us informed and help us. |
| mike_mountford | Thank you for saying thanks. It helps now and then. I will pass along the notes to Stan and John right after we finish. |
| moderator | Do we have any other questions from the room? |
| rjaguirre@utla.net | Is WGN a dead issue? |
| mike_mountford | Yes, unfortunately. THey discontinued conversations with us and again, we are trying to keep the package prices down so adding new channels is not a top priority right now. It's not dead forever. We will possibly take a look at it again at a later point. |
| rjaguirre@utla.net | Will we ever get TBS again? |
| mike_mountford | I don't think so because the 4DTV will not support the blackouts. The only way it would be possible would be if we came up with a new technology that we could use, which I am frustrated with and don't see any light at the end of the tunnel at the moment. |
| GHS | Mike, is Cinemax's HD channels still on Satellite G9 where the HBO and Starz HD channels are in DC format but at a different signal rate that you can call HBO (or Time Warner) to see if they can change the format and be part of the HBO/cinamax package and be available to 4DTV users on C-band? |
| mike_mountford | Unfortunately, that won't happen because HBO's other distributuon to Cable, DBS, SMATV, etc. is approx. 50 million people and the distributiun to C-band is approx. 5,000. I don't think they would make a change for the benefit of the 5,000 at this time. |
| mike_mountford | Thank you everybody. I appreciate it. Nice chat today. |
| rjaguirre@utla.net |