2007 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship in HDTV on CBS - First Round Thursday/Friday! - Page 5

I called WEVV and emailed them to have them switch to HD. I guess they did not listen. Yes they are morons.

Here in the Central Coast, KCOY ch. 12 in Santa Maria (watching on Cox in Santa Barbara) we have been in SD ALL DAY LONG!

I wish I had the number to complain... hard to find... I was busy during lunch, and surprise, basketball coverage was still SD when I got back from work too!

I guess I'm not alone. =(

I suspect Sean McManus will check the ratings tomorrow to see what "hell he wrath". I am sure he had some more pressing things to attend to today.

There isn't a whole lot he could about it this year with the rebuilding of the HD facilities at CBS.

But he did make all the games available -- somewhere -- in HD. That is twice as good as last year. And next year they'll all be available everywhere.

http://www.kcoy.com/content/contacts...c-1d50ac9bdda4

any of those numbers help?

Is it possible that they're doing what Atlanta is and intentionally not showing any games in HD? Are they multicasting in order to show all the games?

Nope, I took half a day off of work for this momentous occasion. The longest anything was in SD before this game was around 8 minutes for the start of the Butler game (I believe). Everything else has been in HD.

YY

Sorry...I responded to the wrong post. That was meant for the guy who said they hadn't had anything in HD all day long (Santa Barbara).

I agree McManus had better things to do today. Keeping shareholders happy is a bit more important then keeping the AVS faithful happy.

I do think station managers could have done better, by having their master control babysit the digital station and providing HD when available from the flex feed and upconvert at other times. Of course their are issue with this and may cause just as many complaints from viewers. However, I think it is easier to explain to an upset viewer that you tried rather then just took the easier route of showing an upconvert. WWJ here in Detroit ran a lower third coming out of breaks saying the MSU game was not available in HD. I sure would not want to be the one answering the phones when someone asks why only one game out of four from the same venue was in SD rather then HD.

got it... thanks! =) however, none of these direct to engineering... that's the number I was looking for... the main office is closed.

danc8379: actually I don't know if they're multicasting tourney games... that would be great! I'll check the local thread.

update [8:03 PM PDT]

Looks like I'm in the same boat as many of you. It's not KCOY's error, but as others stated, a decision to stay with the SD constant feed...


The above quote was from our Santa Barbara thread.

So are there any other affiliates besides Atlanta that refuse to broadcast HD games? I guess they figure they're doing a bigger service by offering all the games via multi-cast so they don't care about screwing those of us with HD.

getting the indiana game in hd....for now.

you think the nba arenas are better setup for HD?

Is anyone getting any HD commercials? I haven't seen one here in Memphis, but I have seen many commercials that I have seen in HD. All commercials are 5.1. Don't know if that's a local or national thing.

But for the record, WREG, 1 sub, terrible motion blocking and the dreaded out of focus blur. The station manager refuses to fix either one of them.

I'm not very knowledgable on this issue, but is the "out of focus blur" a fixable issue on the local level? I see it so frequently on sports broadcasts but assumed it was a network issue...

YY

KIRO-DT, Seattle, Comcast Digital Cable. Lots of pixilization, especially on close up shots. KIRO is carrying the same feed this evening in SD on a second digital channel.

On WMBD, Peoria, via Insight cable. We got lucky and had HD most of the day. Only lost it during a time this afternoon (which I think was a local issue). We had no local teams that would have caused the contant feed - tomorrow will be different.

One thing with the broadcast, I don't think there are as many CBS network promos delivered by the annoucers this year. Thank you CBS - those get old quickly. On the downside, I agree with others that the top scoreboard of other games is unnecessarily large and distracting with the graphics.

Yes i's fixable. It's due to a setting on I think a Harris encoder.

MEDIA, SPORTS BUSINESS AND THE FAN

Day One: CBS flexes muscle
Neil Best, Newsday
SPORTS WATCH


March 16, 2007

It's a big, complicated hoops nation, from the mountains to the prairies to rabid Kentucky fans' mouths white with foam.

In a small room on West 57th Street yesterday, though, the entire multi-mascot, multi-time zone, multi-bracket festival somehow had to be distilled, shrink-wrapped and presented to an anxious continent.

It ain't easy, in spite of the (mostly) calm demeanor of CBS Sports executives - notably president Sean McManus and executive producer Tony Petitti - who had a front-row seat in the "multi-purpose room'' of the CBS Broadcast Center.

At times four games must be juggled for about 200 affiliates, with potentially millions of viewers ready to second-guess CBS' decisions on when to leave one game for another - or not.

"You do get feedback from people as you listen to talk radio driving in the next day,'' Petitti said after the relatively calm afternoon session.

To minimize the discontent, Petitti, McManus and the other dozen people in the room (plus others in the adjacent control room) monitor a wall of 40 screens, including separate ones for each site that are marked "constant'' or "flex.''

"Flex'' indicates the market was assigned a particular game but can leave it for a better one. "Constant'' means a market with a local team involved, and fans who presumably want to watch every minute.

Net effect: When four games are in progress, there are eight blocks of markets about which CBS must make decisions: four flex areas and four constants.

The early slot on the first day illustrated the inevitable complications.

Boston College-Texas Tech and Maryland-Davidson both were close. Louisville-Stanford was not, but 5 percent of the nation was stuck watching nearly every minute.

That probably was fine with the hoops-heads in Kentucky. It surely was not fine with many in the San Francisco area, where the lackluster interest in Stanford faded fast as Louisville pulled away.

A CBS public relations official soon got a call from a northern California reporter asking what could be done. Short answer: Not much. History has proven more people get mad when you bail on a local team in a boring game than when you don't.

(Thus, there is at least one bonus in having the metropolitan area shut out of this year's field of 65: We can be flexed out of any stinker.)

Petitti said most people come to the event wanting a sample of the action, "so we tend to be aggressive whenever we can.''

The color-coded maps CBS uses to keep track of all of this illustrate a diverse nation.

The most broadly assigned game of Day One was last night's Gonzaga-Indiana contest, with 56 percent assigned to it on a flex basis, 5 percent as a constant.

A total of 68 percent will get Georgia Tech-UNLV early today, but New York is part of the 15 percent of the nation that will get Virginia-Albany.

Petitti did most of the talking in the "MP'' room, instructing the far-flung staff in matters as trivial as the volume level in Winston-Salem and as important as when to rescue the 26 percent of America eligible to flex away from Louisville-Stanford. (Very early, as it turned out.)

McManus, also president of CBS News, sits by Petitti's side, even as he juggles his two disparate jobs. Last year, he spoke to a reporter in Baghdad even as he monitored the hoops action.

By the end of the early games, Petitti, McManus and Michael Aresco, senior VP of programming, each was standing as they monitored the final minutes of the two close games.

New York mostly stuck with the BC-Texas Tech game, but by the time it ended and CBS got around to switching to the Maryland-Davidson near-upset, the Terrapins finally had taken control. It happens.

Was it too soon? Too early? Petitti will hear about it on the radio this morning. In the meantime, there still were 13 more games on the schedule, then 16 more today.

http://www.newsday.com/sports/basket...5981160.column

Then they should fix it as I find it very annoying.

Ok...so what's the scoop on Saturday's games? Who will see what? Go Hoosiers!!

Every game was HD for me, and looked great, on WCBS-DT via Cablevision. Since we have no local teams involved we are on "flex feeds" for all time slots. Same should be true for today. I'm assuming that everyone will get all games in HD Saturday and Sunday, even those areas on a constant feed, since there should be no more then three games at any one time.

Me neither and CBS left their affiliates high and dry on this one. They could have taken care of it all by making announcements when they did the flex thing...something like "the rest of the network is going to the blah-blah game but as you are watching from a local market for blah or blah, we will stay with that game for you. However, due to technical limitations, the game you are watching will be broadcast in standard definition..."

To me it would have made more sense to only have the constant feed on the SD channel. Leave the HD channel on flex feed only, and if they cut away from your local interest game you could switch to the SD channel to still watch it. If you still want to watch a specific team that is either up big or getting blown out, then you'd be willing to suffer through watching it in SD.

CBS is doing Flex HD and Constant SD feeds for 1st and 2nd round games, starting next Thursday, all Feeds will be HD full time.

I completely agree with this...the only downside would be if you were recording the game (and not at home) on the HD channel. If the game flexed somewhere else you'd miss the rest of the game that you wanted to watch. Guess you could set up a backup recording on the SD channel, but you'd have to know that could happen in order to do that.

Will CBS using some constant HD feeds during the 2nd round when there aren't 4 games at a time (for example, saturday evening the 4th window only has 2 games...MSU-UNC and IU-UCLA)?

And in the end it will not be the ratings, but those angry station affliates who McManus will have to answer to. If enough people complained then I am sure the home network will get an earful from the affiliates. Since we had two local interest games on yesterday and they flashed the warning repeatedly throughout the night that CBS was not broadcasting the game in HD I am sure station got an earful from non-avs forum users.

Every game that I saw here on KTAB 24.1 in Abilene,TX was in HD. I only missed the Texas A&M game but it was suppose to be a Flex game so I assume it was in HD.

Tonight will be the real test here because ALL of TEXAS is a constant feed for the U of T game according to the map and we will get SD according to what CBS says. Hopefully our local affiliate will babysit the feed and stay with HD until the nation is flexed away. Should be insteresting to see just how willing our local is to please us HD junkies.

BTW the quality was okay for most games Thursday. It was certainly not the best I have seen from CBS this year but it was not the worst I have seen either.

albany/uva in SD

our local news said the UT/LBSU game will be in HD.