Lousy picture quality on Bucs vs Chiefs.

[TpaBob]

CBS's picture quality on both D* and ota seemed really lousy here in Carrollwood today. I'd be really interested in the experiences of others on the board. Granted it was broadcast in SD but come on..

[racemanfl]

It was lousy!!!!!! The next game after the Bucs looked great. Jerry

[mgd2win]

Chiefs - Bucs game was not in HD

[racemanfl]

Well it should have been Jerry

[Dknow]

Well it definately says something for FOX Sports non-HD widescreen PQ. We saw that against New Orleans a few weeks back and some of us actually thought that it was HD. There was no mistaking CBS for HD on Sunday......That was without a doubt SDTV!

[egghead]

Is it a network issue the reason why we dont receive some of the games in hd format?? The network (fox) is broadcasting games through 720i or 480i type format and thats reason why picture quality looks lousy on say 613?? clearly not broadcasting in 1080i.......can someone clarify this for me

[bubblehd647]

Fox broadcast in 720p.

[mgd2win]

FOX (720P) and CBS (1080i) do not broadcast every NFL game in HD. Most of the games are in HD however there are always 1 or 2 games on each network that are NOT broadcast in HD.

There are a couple of reasons for this; 1) There are not enough HD capable production trucks on the road today to handle all of the NFL games along with the other events that are being done in HD on any given weekend. 2) The daily cost of renting the HD trucks is almost double that of a normal production truck and given that most production trucks and crews park-n-power on Friday for a Sunday game that is three days of truck rental.

Things are improving on the number of trucks on the road but the production truck companies have been slow to pony up the 7 million dollars that it takes to build a HD truck. The largest production truck company in the world is www.nmtv.com and they currently have 7 HD trucks including a new one that was built specificlly for Monday Night Football and is dedicated to that program during the seaon.

[bdraw]

Don't forget about the limited bandwidth the networks have for the Sat infrustructure.
CBS can only transmit two HD games at a time, and Fox can do 4 I think(can't remember the exact number). Fox's compressed signal uses about ~15Mbps and the latest statistical multiplexing to transmite the signal to the affiliates ready to be broadcast. CBS sends at about 45Mbps then the affiliate decomresses, and recomresses to 19.3Mbps to be transmit. The low bit rate that Fox uses is part of the reason the Fox games don't look as good as CBS.