"There's not some dude flipping a switch from HD to SD during commercials."
You would be surprised, many affiliates have automated systems but alot of them are still manual. At the very least their is someone monitoring it and verifying that all the commercials are being played.
The other thing is that many affiliates can only splice SD so they have to switch to SD to splice the commercials. You can notice this when they splice in the local commercials at the end of the break and the images changes. For example our NBC affiliates stretches their SD, so the national commercials are 4x3 and the local commercials are spliced in. Sometimes they screw up and don't switch back to HD.
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"There's not some dude flipping a switch from HD to SD during commercials."
You would be surprised, many affiliates have automated systems but alot of them are still manual. At the very least their is someone monitoring it and verifying that all the commercials are being played.
The other thing is that many affiliates can only splice SD so they have to switch to SD to splice the commercials. You can notice this when they splice in the local commercials at the end of the break and the images changes. For example our NBC affiliates stretches their SD, so the national commercials are 4x3 and the local commercials are spliced in. Sometimes they screw up and don't switch back to HD.