Evidence that All CBS NFL Games May Be In HD
Those of you who have followed the saga of CBS’ HD NFL coverage may find this interesting. The DirecTV Sunday Ticket Schedule has an HD channel assigned to every game, even the weeks when CBS is broadcasting up to 8 games! This may be the first indication from an NFL partner that CBS will be producing all NFL games in HD this year.
Back in May, our contact at CBS indicated that no final decision had been made yet, but that the network high defiinition NFL coverage would “most likely be in the neighborhood of 6-7 games/week in HD”. Shortly after that, EngadgetHD reported on a post over at AVSForum by the reputable KenH who looked into his magic8 ball and said that all CBS NFL games will be available in HD this year. However, there still has been no official word out of CBS.
While the DirecTV schedule certainly is not an ‘official’ announcement, we are really hoping this isn’t just a really stupid mistake. So should we go ahead and add all of the CBS games to the NFL HD Schedule??
UPDATE: In case DirecTV makes any changes to their schedule or removes the HD Channel assignments, below is a screen capture of week 2, with the eight CBS NFL games highlighted.
HUGE thanks go out to Gary for sending this link in.
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July 27th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
The DirecTV schedule contains some errors. The season opener is listed for 212, when the game will appear on NBC. The Cowboys and Lions Thanksgiving matchups are also listed for 212, when they will appear on CBS and Fox. This could be an error resulting from running an automated script that selected all Thursday games and assigned them to channel 212. I would not say it is confirmation, but it does indicate that on DirecTV’s end, they are capable of airing every regular season game in HD.
July 29th, 2008 at 7:47 am
Initially, this sounds like good news, because last year, HD games had their own special channel. But now, Directv’s HD receivers can ’see’ both an SD channel and an HD channel assigned the same channel number. Plus the receivers can be set to hide the SD channel when their is an HD version *of the channel* (not the programming).
Take SNY for instance. Not all programming is HD, but the receiver receives it all on SNY-HD (625). So assigning channels for HD receivers to receive Sunday Ticket does not necessarily mean that every game will be produced in HD. Just that the receiver will get the programming on an HD capable channel.
But there is certainly some good news from these channel assigments: every game will have its own dedicated channel. No longer will long running early games preempt the beginning of late games.
August 9th, 2008 at 11:45 am
If CBS wants, they can borrow my Sony HD Handycam for the game. It even has a 160 GB hard drive!