Audio Video News

Last year, despite the relative lack of properly equipped sports fans, CBS broadcast the Super Bowl in HDTV. Fox Network is broadcasting this year's professional football championship game from New Orleans, but its video resolution will be scaled back due to cost constraints.

Instead of the ultimate high resolution format, 1080i, the Super Bowl will be shown in what Fox is calling "Fox Widescreen," or 480p with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The format—EDTV (enhanced definition TV)—is actually one of the 18 acceptable variants of digital television as formulated by the Advanced Television Standards Committee. Fox recognized that even though there are more than two million American homes now equipped with HD receivers and/or monitors, cable systems still don't carry HD signals.

The network also chose 480p because it is relatively inexpensive to produce compared to true high-def. "Unlike an HD movie, where you can get by with two or three cameras, a football game requires a high-definition camera at every position," Forrester Research senior analyst Josh Bernoff explained to CNET news.

How will Fox broadcast the game in both NTSC and EDTV formats? Fox's Jim Defilippis told Craig Birkmaier, moderator of the OpenDTV newsgroup, "The production of the game, pre-game, and halftime show will be 480i60 widescreen (16:9). All cameras will be set for widescreen and the show will be produced in the shoot wide/protect 4 X 3 mode. All graphics will be centered and kept within the safe 4 X 3 area. Any legacy or 4 X 3 elements will be converted to a 16 X 9 frame with a backplate (instead of black). The 16 X 9 is the full production mix, with the 4 X 3 derived; thus for the first time the DTV viewer will have everything the NTSC viewer sees and more.

"The output of the truck(s) will go to LA as a full 16 X 9. In LA, an ARC (aspect ratio converter) will cut out a 4 X 3. There will be individual net rooms: one for 4 X 3, the other for the 16 X 9. We will deliver a 4 X 3 to all stations and for the DTV stations they'll get a digital 16 X 9 480i60 feed. Our stations will then convert this to a 480p60 signal for broadcast." In short, Superbowl cameras will operate in 480i, and the stations will do the line-doubling, not unlike what happens when a DVD player's output is fed to an upconverting video processor. The result will probably look very good, but won't be true high-def.

In other high definition sports news, NBC and HDNet will provide high-rez coverage—1080i video with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound—of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics games, February 8–24. Olympic competition from the previous day will be broadcast daily from 3–11 pm ET, then replayed until 3 pm the next day. In other words, there won't be any live, real-time HDTV coverage of events in Salt Lake City. HD broadcasts will be delayed by one day from their legacy TV counterparts, but will include the opening and closing ceremonies, figure skating, speed skating, ski jumping, and hockey competition. DirecTV subscribers will be able to pick up NBC's HDTV Olympics on Channel 199.

NBC won't be the first network to beam Olympic events in high definition, despite some publicity to the contrary. That honor belongs to Japan's NHK, which aired the world's first HD Olympic images from Barcelona, Spain during the 1992 summer games.