Wednesday, April 25, 2007

More HDTV NFL next season

NFL football fans will be able to get more games in high definition next season. CBS announced this week that it will fair five or six games per week in HDTV. That's up from three last season.

Fox airs up to six games weekly, though both networks can carry as many as eight games per week, so a handful of games still will not be seen in high-definition.

This is a great boon to NFL fans and sports fans and even big box audio/video stores which use HDTV sports feeds to help sell those shiny new LCD and plasma big screen televisions.

It'll be interesting to see how DirecTV will handle the extra hi-def games. It's NFL Sunday Ticket Superfan package last year offered out-of-market games in hi-def, but DirecTV had to shut down some HDTV channels to do it because of bandwidth limitations. The satellite company plans to have new satellites in the air before year's end when it plans to up its current HDTV offerings by more than ten-fold, ultimately arriving at more than 100 stations.

But if they are not ready in time for the start of football season, other channels might not be shown in HDTV on Sundays to allow for the extra HDTV NFL feeds.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Lang for keeping track of this stuff. It matters.

I know that a couple times last year when the double-header game wasn't in HD, I could care less.

But we also have to admit that the basic NFL Ticket freak is a fantasy fan boy (or gal) who could care less about HD -- as long as it is live.