Stupid local affilliate stations!

Well as you may know I live in the DeepSouth(R) and we have a lot of weather around here. All four major network stations in the Mobile/Pensacola market broadcast in HD and it's wonderful. Unless the wind is blowing. Or it's raining somewhere. Or there's a hurricane somewhere in the Atlantic Basin. Or somebody just "forgets" to flip the HD switch. Or any of a thousand other things happen.

In the interest of looking like they care about the safety of their viewers, these stations insist on running informational crawls, weather maps in the corner, and other various types of screen clutter.

OK, I can live with some of that. If there's a tornado in my neighborhood I want to know about it. The problem is, none of these stations have yet upgraded their graphics generators to support HD. So anytime they want to put any kind of local content on the screen, they fallback to an SD signal, pillarboxed, without the Dolby Digital(R) audio. I did not buy an HD set and surround sound audio system to watch this kind of butchered content.

Of course, weather events seem to occur only during prime time network shows, and amazingly the conditions drastically improve whenever it's time for commercials.

Hey local stations! Two of you have a fulltime weather station on one of your subchannels. How about just reminding the viewers on a regular basis of that subchannel's existence. And please, upgrade your graphics equipment.