From what media do premium channels (or networks, for that matter,) broadcast movies on TV? I would presume DVD’s now, but was there some special tape or something different before the digital age? The clarity on HBO et al. has always been better than VHS, IMHO.
Up until recently, 2" tape was the standard broadcast medium. It’s probably still widely used, but I haven’t been inside the industry for many years, so I can’t say for sure.
I only worked at a small podunk TV station, but all our recordings were on 3/4-inch tape, including some (very old) syndication packages. We didn’t have any 2-inch equipment at all. This was around eight to ten years ago.
NOTE: I used to work for a company that distributed news clips to all NBC and ABC affiliates around the country.
An NBC affiliate in some small town needs clips of national and international news to run on their newscast, as it’s highly unlikely that they will have a reporter actually on the scene in New York or Baghdad. Both NBC and ABC used to have special “channels” that did nothing but broadcast these stories 24 hours a day; the station usually had two (or more) VCRs that recorded these shows. Telexed\faxed indices sent from the networks would tell the news director what time a certain story aired, so he or she (actually, one of their underlings) would then have to sift through all the tape to find the story that the ND wanted to run.
My former company encoded all these broadcasts as MPEG2 streams and sent them via satellite to computers at every NBC and ABC affiliate. Our computer had a built-in web server, so all the news director needed to do was open a web browser to the server and click on any of the many categories (politics, foreign, sports) to see what stories were available; he or she could click an MPEG1 “thumbnail” to preview the story if they so chose. They could then dump the story to tape via RS232 interface to the VCR or go directly to air with the MPEG2 stream.
The reason I’m telling you all of this is because the various affiliates (425+ each for ABC and NBC) had differing degrees of technological sophistication. For example, NBC affiliate WRC (Washington DC) is 100% digital - every show, every commercial, every newscast and every clip on every newscast comes off a hard drive. On the other hand, a smaller (i.e. poorer) affiliate like WMGM in Linwood (Atlantic City), New Jersey is almost entirely analog. In fact, the electronics at that station look like a space ship in a 1950s sci-fi movie.
I suppose that you’re actually asking about the networks themselves. Given their push to get their affiliates as digital as possible, I’m assuming that their broadcasts come from MPEG2 (or possibly MPEG4 these days) streams off hard drives some where.
I was mainly wondering what kind of media the movies are broadcast from, considering the usual excellent video quality. If HBO is showing “The Usual Suspects,” for example, are they just playing the DVD, or something different. Before DVD’s, I was presuming there had to be some kind of high-quality tape, but was just curious. Thanks for all the replies.