From Broadcasting & Cable

Advertisers may have agreed to the record $2.6 million for a 30-second spot during CBS’ Super Bowl XLI broadcast. But not all were willing to cough up the premium—perhaps an additional 10% in production costs—for delivering their spots in HD.

By our count, 22 of the 69 Super Bowl commercials ran in SD, including those from luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz and technology companies like Motorola.

Ten of those standard-def ads, such as Blockbuster’s "mouse" spot, were in the 4:3 aspect ratio used by analog TVs. The rest were shot in widescreen but "letter-boxed" for 4:3 screens. So on a 16:9 HD screen, the ads appeared as a smaller widescreen image, with black borders on all four sides.

Since less than 15% of TV households receive HD, it’s understandable that some advertisers passed on the cost of hi-def—even for the Super Bowl, which typically features far more HD ads than normal programming on the broadcast networks.

But some standard-def holdouts were surprising—and more than a little ironic. Toshiba, for one, ran an ad produced for conventional screens that touted its HD-DVD high-definition disc player—a product designed specifically for widescreen HDTV sets.

A Toshiba spokesman insists the spot was produced and broadcast in HDTV. But it sure didn’t fill our screen.

The SD ads were skipped in our household. That was the only buffer that we could create on our Tivo because many present wanted to see the SB commercials.

There were a lot more HD ads last year.

My edited recording of just the HD ads (without repeat showings, of which there were a handful during the game), runs about 30 minutes. Last year's runs about 15 minutes. So I think you're misremembering last year (not surprising; studies show that people remember things in the past as better than the present even when the reverse is true).

So I think you're misremembering last year (not surprising; studies show that people remember things in the past as better than the present even when the reverse is true).


I don't think so.

http://archive2.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=630517

I skipped a lot more ads this year because they were in SD.

One issue with the HD commercials is that there often needs to be a separate version of HD and SD delivered for optimal framing. The case of a letterboxed SD spot that's upconverted to HD with pillars added to create the postage stamp effect is a very odd decision to me.