Those of you involved in fantasy football can relate to the tough decisions on draft day. What if I have a choice between Travis Henry and Clinton Portis as my stud running back? My loyalty to the Buffalo Bills demands that I choose Henry, while the return of run-happy Joe Gibbs to the Washington Redskins means that Portis could take the rushing title this season. Decisions, decisions.
Of course, in my world of fantasy football the choice is easy—Clinton Portis. Why? Forget the rushing stats and all that crap—Portis is with an NFC team, which means the odds are better that I’ll see him play in HD on Fox...and HD is my football fantasy.
Yes, the network that was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of HD has taken the bull by the horns and will air up to six games a week in HD, leaving ABC/ESPN’s two games a week in the dust.
Fox’s NFL On Fox in HD has also been a boon to equipment manufacturers, with a number of HD production trucks built especially for HD football.
To Fox’s credit, they’re doing HD the smart way (see page 14) and with the best HD format for sports: 720p.
There’s no arguing that 1080/30i has more picture resolution than 720/60p (unless you want to argue that 1080/30i is really 540/60p). There’s also no arguing that 720p provides just 195 more lines of resolution than the current 525 NTSC standard (unless you argue that 525/30i NTSC is really 262.5/60p, in which case the 720/60p HD service would have almost three times the resolution of today’s standard definition picture).
There’s also no arguing that progressive is easier to compress than interlace, home displays are moving away from interlace toward progressive, it’s easier to go from progressive to interlace than from interlace to progressive, and interlace artifacts such as temporal distortion between fields making up a frame can soften the picture, especially during camera moves, zooms, and rapid subject movement like those in sports. Remember, video is moving pictures. Who wants to see the blur of temporal distortion between two interlace fields...especially in HD?
There’s another little benefit to 720p: Since it’s possible to get two 720p signals into one DTV channel, Fox could, in theory, air two HD games in each market simultaneously. (Not that it’ll ever happen, but a guy can dream can’t he?)
Still, this is all rather pointless for networks whose bread and butter is based on ratings. You see, there’s no system in place to measure the ratings of HD programs. Back in June, I picked on the not-so-brilliant folks at Nielsen Media Research in my other magazine, DigitalTV. I had so much fun I thought I would bash them again here.
I still applaud the fact that Nielsen’s PVR ratings plan will be ready a year ahead of schedule (A/P Meter in April 2005 in the local set-meter markets and July 2005 in the National People Meter Sample and in Local People Meter markets with the capability to measure time-shifted viewing). But Nielsen has no public comment on when the industry can expect HDTV ratings measurements.
How important is this? Let’s follow the money: HDTVs are still a sizeable investment...an investment made by people with money...money that advertisers would like redirected to their products and services. Some networks really pull in those money viewers, like The Golf Channel (TGC). Nice demographics at TGC—wealthy older folks with lots of disposable income—the kind of folks that advertisers with big-ticket items love to hawk stuff to. But what if TGC couldn’t give advertisers ratings info for their HD viewers? Well, they can’t. Which is why Andy Murphy, the vice president of network operations for TGC told me that HDTV won’t “realistically become an issue for three to five years.” All because there’s no way to measure those highly coveted HDTV viewers.
Nielsen’s response? In a letter from Susan Whiting, Nielsen’s U.S. president and CEO, she reminds the industry that “buyers and sellers of commercial time need to have absolute trust in the integrity and inclusiveness of the ratings estimates as the currency for the television industry. Nielsen’s job is to continue to make certain that television is the best-measured medium.”
Obviously “inclusiveness” does not include HDTV.
Luckily for us (at least I think it may be lucky), broadcasters have been pushed into HD with nothing to show for it. Sure, we get to work on better and newer gear and the viewing public gets to see better pictures (even the standard definition viewers get better pictures due to HD’s oversampling), but there has to be a payback for HD to become the norm and for magazine editors like me to start taking those not doing HD to task.
