National Geographic HD’s CEO on HD Broadcasting
September 25, 2006
One of the unfortunate by-products of living in the consumer age is often complaining about poor quality much more frequently than praising exceptional products or services. If every high definition broadcaster had the same vision as National Geographic HD’s, Executive Vice President of Programming John Ford, we’d all be enjoying much more high definition content.
Ford was responsible for much of the high definition content at Discovery HD Theater as president of new media; Ford seems to be taking that all HD all the time philosophy to heart in his new position at NatGeo HD as well. In a recent TV Week question and answer Ford states:
“We made it a mandate. The simplest way to go all-HD in your production is to bite the bullet and say, “Everything from this day forward is made in HD unless we have a dramatically good reason not to do that.”
As stated in the past, I’ve really enjoyed much of the programming on NatGeo thus far and I can’t wait to get the channel in high definition, which is why I was particularly interested in another comment made by Ford when posed with the question: “What is your distribution at this point?”
Ford: “With Dish we’re on a tier. The total for our standard definition network is 61 (million households). HD is in the several hundred thousand range. But there’s a launch at the end of September … which hasn’t been announced yet. There’s this stuff that’s all in flux.”
What could this launch at the end of September entail? satellite, HD cable? If it’s Comcast it would almost make up for the constant image break-ups I get on HBO-HD, almost.
Posted by B.Greenway | | Filed Under HDTV Programming
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