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ION scared off by the DTV transition, postpones debut another month
Seriously, ION, this is getting ridiculous. With a healthy dose of spin, ION TV is delaying its planned February 16 HD launch by a month so it will not coincide with the confusion around the DTV transition. We'll admit that the state of the analog shutoff is a real mess, but somehow we think that any money-making enterprise would want to sweep in with advertiser-loved HD content to put before viewers' eyes. Anyhow, the service is now planning to pull the HD trigger in 20 markets on March 16, and then 25 more markets on what we assume will be perfectly normal, nonconfusing days later in the year.EDIT: reworked a murky sentence for clarity.
ION sets to launch HD in 2009, no kidding this time
Seriously, guys, ION promises that this time around when it says it has a schedule for an HD launch, it's for real; maybe the previous 2008 figure was a clerical error, because now things are go for 2009. ION Television will lead things off in the first quarter, with the other two offerings getting switched on sometime later in the year -- qubo will target kids' eyeballs and multilingual ears and ION Life will offer up themes of "active lifestyles and personal growth." Sounds great, right? Well, not so fast -- even though the company has taken an extra year in prep, this year's press release has some pretty familiar echoes of the previous one that we don't like the sound of: "native and up-converted HD programming."
