It’s a messy situation over here when it comes to watching the world cup. But yes, I’ve finally got HDTV working on my HD capable MacBook Pro 17 with hi-res screen.
The world cup broadcast rights are owned by Channel 10, but games are also broadcast by FoxTel – Aussie’s equivalent of Sky.
Sky does play the games live, but their on-TV guide is updated barely 24 hours ahead at times.
Sky’s broadcast quality is woeful – very low resolution, which doesn’t do well with the panoramic shots used by the European broadcasters used to Football (the round ball version) and mature markets with good HDTV distribution.
Meanwhile Sky broadcasts in glorious HD quality. Except there are two issues – first the quality of playback is terrible when there is lots of movement (which means I prefer those panoramic shots) and secondly Channel 10 inserts advertisements at seemingly random times.
Oh – and thirdly they don’t actually play that many games, and nor do they do them on time. They played one of the myriad AFL ‘finals’ rather than the NZ-Italy game live, right now the Samoans are taking on South Africa, and Chanel Ten is showing, well, this:
Yup – they are talking about the prospect of the game, rather than show the live pictures. Losers.
Interestingly enough the replays that FoxTel played on Saturday used NZ TV3 commentary, so I am able to empathise with one commenter on Rod’s post on the commentary matter in NZ. The commentry there is woeful, the coverage by Ten here is woeful and yet sometimes this always happens as the economics of big events clouds the thinking of broadcasters who really don’t care about the sport the rest of the time. It’s not as if we are going to switch loyalties to Ten or TV3 based on one event – we’ll follow the quality content to where it resides.
Lance Wiggs 