HDTV Olympic coverage in North America: who's got more?
By Kevin C. Tofel 
posted Jan 26th 2006 2:36PM
posted Jan 26th 2006 2:36PM
We were stoked
earlier this month to find that NBC will have over 416 hours of
Olympic coverage from Torino, but we must have ticked off the Canadians. CBC is touting over 1,000 hours of Olympic
coverage for Canadian viewers, but only 39 of those hours will be in high-def. That works out to be approximately 4% of
the Canadian coverage in HD, while a bulk of ours will be high-def. Still, this is a positive step as it marks Canada's
very first year of the games in high-def. Now all that needs to happen is for us to win more Winter Sports medals than
them. Oh wait, we did the last time
around, 34-17. Yikes!
well don't start dancing just yet
first the canadians will get an unmolested 19.3mbps feed; good luck finding a NBC local that will provide that.
NBC's main channel will be a HD simulcast, which means lots of upconverted shots during events that have HD coverage, and quite a few events will be all upconverted. plus knowing their penchant for those athlete background stories, they'll probably be SD and i'm going to guess all their stuido stuff will be SD too - they like to pinch their pennies at the peacock.
all that and NBC's lackluster HDTV record means it could be another bit blender olympics like last time.