Want to see your local team's tourney game in HD? Not this week
By Richard Lawler 
posted Mar 16th 2007 6:03PM
posted Mar 16th 2007 6:03PM
Despite many commenters complaining about extended SD-only periods of NCAA Tournament action, we've gotten a lot of HD action on our CBS feed. As it turns out, the home team (University of Michigan) being NIT-bound might have guaranteed us more HDTV action than say, North Carolina residents. A CBS spokeswoman explained to The Mercury News that a lack of capacity causes the network to ensure the local market gets its preferred game, by only sending an SD feed. Otherwise, you'll get a "flex" feed, that switches to the best action, and in high definition. Next week, once some teams have been eliminated, there will be enough capacity to get every game, to every market in HD. CBS says it's "likely" their capabilities will change for next year, but if they don't, HDTV owners might be rooting against their alma mater next winter.
I live in NC and have not had any SD problems. Every game has been in glorious HD so far, slightly mitigating my sorrow from seeing my team crap out in the first round.
I've had some local games that switch to HD halfway through the game.
Below is an email I received from my local CBS affiliate (Lansing, MI) when I emailed to complain of the lack of HD footage...
[quote] [We were] to be a Constant Station for the Michigan State VS Marquette game. CBS told us that we could not have an HD feed of the game, only Flex Stations would have HD coverage of various games. CBS made a mistake and sent us the HD feed for the first half, then when they went to other games the HD feed was not on the Michigan State game, so they wanted us to upconvert for our HD viewers. Sorry for the confusion! [/quote]
Sounds like marketing poo-poo to me, more like a BS excuse.
I've been counting, it looks like the same limitation that they have with the NFL. Due to my location and Bell ExpressVu I have 3 CBS feeds, 2 East Coast and 1 West. Whenever I had 3 different games going, only 2 would be in high def. And when the local team played, the first half was hi-def and when it became a blowout it turned into standard def. It seems to me they have 2 transponders for high def feeds and can't expand for some costly reason. I truly believe CBS has had the best HDTV picture for a long time and they spent a lot of money for it. Hopefully soon this limitation can be overcome.
On the Directv Mega March Madness package it goes in and out of high-definition for seems like no reason at all. I've seen 3 games being broadcast at once in high-definition but I could have missed it doing less games in hid-def or more.