Milwaukee's WISN introduces HD on-screen weather graphic
By Darren Murph 
posted January 18th 2009 10:37AM
posted January 18th 2009 10:37AM
It's a pet peeve of anyone who watches any amount of high-definition television: the oh-so-annoying weather caption. Picture this: you and your pals gather 'round the tele to catch an HD sporting event, and on the final play of the second half, your local broadcaster decides to insert a breaking weather scroll to inform you that it's been snowing for four hours now. Traditionally, that insertion forces the game to shift to an SD feed, essentially ruining your viewing experience. Thankfully, the engineers at Milwaukee's WISN have figured out how to slot in an HD-friendly weather bug that keeps viewers up to speed on alerts while keeping their hair follicles safe and frustration levels down. Kudos, WISN.
Wow, I'm surprised it's taken anyone this long to figure this out. This is definitely one of my pet peeves. The Chicago weather last week screwed up the season premiere of 24 for me.
The worst is when the engineer at the station forgets to switch the feed back to HD after the bug is done crawling. It seems to happen to WMAQ here in Chicago quite a bit.
At this time, it's impossible for Fox affiliates to insert crawls or graphics over network HD programming. Fox is supposed to be rolling out a new system that will allow this soon, though.
KTKA, the ABC affiliate here in Topeka has had an HD weather bug for over a year now. It requires a software or hardware upgrade to the weather bug system. I contacted our other two stations that provide weather crawls and bugs and only one of them responded. KSNT, the Topeka NBC affiliate said they would be buying the software upgrade to provide an HD weather bug and crawl after the digital transition is over with, before the severe weather season begins.
WIBW in Topeka can also insert the crawl and weather bug over their HD picture as I've seen them do it in the past. KTKA has been doing it for awhile. I know here in Kansas City KSHB/KMCI and KMBC/KCWE can do it as well, and I think KCTV can now do it as well on both KCTV and KSMO.
WIBW down converts their HD picture to SD during severe weather events. They do it any time they crawl anything from "join us in live blogging" to "a tornado warning has been issued for..." They don't yet have the capability to scroll anything or put weather bugs on HD programming.
It's nice to see that affiliates are starting to WISN up about these things.
Sorry, I'm sorry. I'll leave now.
I'll second that "here in Chicago" bit. WLS does EVERYthing in HD, from news, to weather, and sports, but WMAQ is still Ways behind. After first launching in HD, only the studio cams were HD, then weather went HD, and I JUST saw they has A single game's highlights in HD. As for the weather bug, WFLD is the only station that doesn't do news in HD, and thus they certainly can't do the bug in HD yet. WMAQ should get it at some point soon, but the best I've seen is WBBM. They opened a new studio a couple months ago build ALL HD from the start. HD studio AND remote cams, HD weather, and HD sports including all the bugs and graphics. Congrats CBS, you're giving ABC a run for their money.
-Brian
WWBT here in Richmond, VA has also been doing this for close to a year, but I am glad to see it spreading to other stations.
For someplace like Milwaukee, who has yet to launch a single HD newscast, a step like adding the temperature to the channel bug or adding crawls while remaining in HD for both is a major step.
Of course, they have yet to implement the ability to show school closings and such in HD. For those they just have a crawl saying "tune to the analog channel for closing information." Nor do I suspect that they are able to do the severe weather coverage, again other than crawls. (Although frankly, I'd be thrilled if they were never able to do so, and they would just go back to using only the simple yet serviceable crawls.)
Do we really need the Milwaukee newscasts in HD? What anchorwoman do we have that even looks good enough to demand it? Besides that why watch the news in Milwaukee when it's always the same thing...
1) Weather - it's cold or it's snowing, blah, blah, blah
2) This black man shot and killed that black man in this black neighborhood
3) Story on frivolous spending by local government
4) Story about how our Milwaukee Public Schools suck even more today
5) More weather, blah, blah, blah
6) Sports - Brewers lose, Packers lose, Bucks lose...again, Badger Basketball looking good
Detroit has two stations with this capability, WDIV and WXYZ.
I think is funny as Darren wrote this article as its something brand new and no one else is doing in. (at least that's my take on the text) but I also live in KC and have enjoyed this on a few channels.
Arent the bloggers suppose to be HD experts???? hehe
Mitchell
Oops. I accidently voted negative on Mitchell's comment. My bad. I meant to vote positive. I agree. Like this isn't being done anywhere else in the country already. It's been done for a long time in other markets. Even here in Topeka, Kansas we have stations, well one station, doing this. It isn't any big discovery.
I live in Portland Oregon and when my local NBC channel puts up a banner overlay, the audio drops from 5.1 to stereo. I'm watching the channel over OTA. Anyone else experience this?
How is this news? I've seen this coming from the CBS station in the little city of Waco, TX for about 18 months now.
What is strange is that they can overlay HD crawls, bugs, etc, but their news is still in SD :)
Maybe I just did a time warp back to 2006
here in the Triad, NC, about half our stations can. this has come about in the past 6 months. our ABC ruined a few Lost episodes for me last year, I hope they have that fixed now.
seems like they all have the "get ready for the DTV cutover in Feb" messages crawling across the top these days. that's a good sign.
I'm glad to see one station here in Milwaukee has finally made the switch to using a HD bug. After watching every station change over to a SD feed to run the weather updates that we get so regularly, I am pleased to keep the HD feed. Some stations don't have the decency to switch back to HD after they are finished with their update. They would rather leave the show in SD until the next one starts. While I agree this is not new to many, its still news - be it more local than engadgetHD worthy.
Very true. I just can't forget when our local Milwaukee CBS affiliate decided to take away the HD feed from the Packers game so they could put a 30 min countdown to their packer recap show showing after the game. What moron thought that one up! Thankfully, FOX carried most of the other games, so on the other days, I didn't have a problem.