The Frame, Fine Art Channel in HD

We’ve all been there…Guests arrive and want to see what that gargantuan HDTV in corner can really do. Only this time they’re with girlfriends, wives or maybe they’re a more cultured crowd for whom last year’s Superbowl on the HD-PVR or T2 on Blu-ray just won’t do. Here’s a suggestion, HD art galleries are getting very popular these days. 

Composition - it’s a word that corresponds with art somehow and may help us art-less types sound a little less like a Philistine. Or maybe it has the opposite effect. But you know what they say - ignorance is bliss. 

Shaw Cable is Canada’s second largest cable TV operator next to Rogers. The company has announced it’ll air a new channel called The Frame in HD. It’s a commercial-free, 24-hour channel that’ll transmit award winning art collections and photography inside the frame of your HDTV. 

The whole experience will be set to music while it frames fine art collections from 16 galleries. Collections will include Canada Collects, Animal kingdom, Water World, Birds of a Feather, The Seven Seas, Canadian Horizons, City Lights, Sands of Time, Gardens of Delight and more. Galleries will appear on a half-hour rotation basis and individual works will change every 30 seconds. 

Macroblocking – it’s a word that corresponds with compressed digital images through Cable TV. Especially if the images are moving quickly, macroblocking will appear as pixelization of the images. On the other hand, some of the more impressionistic works might see subtle improvements with a light sheen of digital distortion. But you know what they say – ignorance is bliss. 

The Frame has already been showing on Shaw HD in Calgary and has apparently been successful enough to go nationwide. The station will roll out to the high-brow HDTV consumers throughout Canada this September.