HDTV World Cup madness sweeps the world...but not South America
By Richard Lawler 
posted Jun 2nd 2006 8:13PM
posted Jun 2nd 2006 8:13PM
With World Cup action just a week away, HDTVs are flying off store shelves and broadcasters are gearing up to provide high definition signals worldwide...but not quite. If you live in the Americas south of Mexico there will be no high-def broadcasts available to you as the governments there have not agreed on a broadcast standard. As the article notes (and we've noted previously), Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Colombia are looking into it, but will not have anything set until well after this summer's sports action has ended. Unfortunately, the people of futbol-crazy South America won't get the same broadcast quality available elsewhere, at least in Europe people will go to bars or even movie theaters to catch the HD game. Our government (with quite a bit of prodding from CE manufacturers) at least has a standard set so we can watch HD, now if they can just work something out so cable subscribers can get more channels.
Read (Translated by Google)
That's actually not true.
A cable operator in Brazil is launching its HD transmissions with the world cup.
For more information: www.tva.com.br/hd
Actually not being able to see the games in HD isn't limited to South America. Ask any TWC subscriber in NYC. It's been a year of begging them to give us ESPN2-HD (about half of the games are broadcasted only on ESPN2) in time for the World Cup without any success.
In Australia we've had OTA (free to air) HD for years now, but all we're getting is the World Cup in widescreen SD. It's terrible. :(
The user "Fer" was right.
There is a Brazilian cable operator that will transmit the World cup in 1080i
Thanks for the link. I'm a daily reader of HD Beat, so it's an honor!
Fer is right, he actually stopped by our blog and posted the link to TVA of Brazil. Even though the government there hasn't decided on an HDTV standard, TVA is a cable operator, so they can transmit however they like to their set top boxes.
The World Cup transmission by TVA is actually going to be the first HDTV broadcast in South America.
But the rest of "futbol-crazy South America" is out of luck. And I just got a 45-inch 1080p Sharp Aquos hoping that at least some cable or satellite operator in Chile would surprise us just in time for the World Cup. :(
Don't forget Oceania - no HD for Australia and New Zealand for some time. Thanks SkyNZ, third world satelite provider. I'll end up on Bit torrent tracking down the good games from an HD source.
Don't worry about it South America. The other nations will record it, then you can watch it all in Hi-Def glory.