April 07, 2009

US Masters on BBC HD

Teeing off on Thursday, April 9th at 9pm is high definition coverage of the US Masters Golf extravaganza. Three and a half hours through to the small hours for four days, it looked great last year and hopefully will be as good this. Enjoy.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

And for those of us who have no interest in sport we have all our usual shows cancelled. With only one HD channel to play with the BBC should think more carefully before doing this type of thing. Why not just stick it on BBC 3 or 4, it's not as if golf is some sort of high def beauty.

Anonymous said...

Speak for yourself.

VM HD customers are starved of sport and I personally am looking forward to this despite being a part-time golf fan

Anonymous said...

If BBC HD had more sport coverage, think most people would be very happy.

Certianly better than things like Ladies detective agency ha

Anonymous said...

"Why not just stick it on BBC 3 or 4, it's not as if golf is some sort of high def beauty."

It's already on BBC2/BBC1... not much need to simulcast it in SD on multiple channels!

I've always criticised strange sports scheduling (why cancel the BBC2 schedule, show the BBC1 schedule on BBC2, and show sport on BBC1? EVERYONE gets those two channels so leave the BBC1 schedule where it was and show the sports on BBC2!) and I'm not too interested in golf but this is a fairly big live event and it's good that they're showing in HD. With only one HD channel it does make sense to sometimes replace the normal schedule with live events, and it's going to be that way until TV moves past traditional linear channels - BBC do already do some sports coverage on "red button" instead of channels, but usually only when BBC1/BBC2 are already showing main sports events in place of normal schedules, and of course not in HD. Maybe after digital switchover they won't need to cancel normal schedules for sports? No they'll probably still pander to those who want to watch normal schedules AND sport but don't have any recording/catchup services...

And why would you say golf is not "some sort of high def beauty"? As I already said I'm not interested in golf and wouldn't ever watch much, but golf courses are definitely pretty and benefit from being shown in HD!

Lewpy said...

I do notice a slight weirdness to the HD encoding of the Masters. Perhaps it is something being lost in re-encoding across the Atlantic, or something.
There seems to be more motion-blur than UK sports events (Six Nations, for example).
I also noticed some extreme blocking issues, where square blocks onscreen of things like railings (stripy pattern) just failed to move during panning shots, causing very obvious image distortion.