BBC America HD Launches for Nobody

by Josh Roth @ 6:02 pm July 22nd, 2009

A few weeks ago it was announced that BBC America would finally start broadcasting in HD starting on July 20th, the problem is the deadline came and went without any sign of the channel launching. Well, BBC America released a statement saying their channel is indeed in HD now…but that no cable providers are carrying it. Effectively, they are broadcasting to no one.

BBC America planned the release of their HD channel around a brand spankin’ new, 5 episode mini-series of Torchwood to play straight over 5 nights. I’m a Comcast subscriber, and I’ve been rather happy with their service so far. Once the premiere of Torchwood arrived I was disappointed to see that there was no HD channel to be found! A quick twitter search showed that absolutely no one was carrying the channel, even though it was the supposed premiere of the channel. I’m not sure exactly who to blame for this mix-up, is it the cable providers or the BBC?

If we’ve learned anything from this complete clusterfrak, it’s the problem with cable television. Word on the street is that there isn’t enough bandwidth to support any new HD channels right now…so we’ve got to wait a few months. Cable packages are a wreck, I’ve got 900 channels, and only about 30 that I ever tune to. I’ve got a myriad of sports channels in HD that I simply don’t need, and yet they’re the reason I can’t get the channels I want in HD.

A la carte would be the real way to go. In this age of iTunes and Hulu on demand content is all the rage. Why can’t I pick and choose which channels I want and don’t want? That way we could have a much wider selection of channels, and we could actually get precisely which channels want.