Canucks Nation

Darren did a little digging into why the widescreen broadcast of the Canucks vs. Avalanche game last weekend had the edges cut off for regular TV viewers. Darren posted the full email reply from 'a senior television executive' to the Canucks Central forums. There's some good info there, like why the CBC doesn't broadcast both games on Saturday nights in HD, and what went wrong during the broadcast of the game in Colorado:

We generally shoot the second game with an SD digital mobile. That's because today, we have only one HD mobile, and rentals are extremely expensive. These mobiles produce a high quality digital standard definition signal. It is widescreen. This was the circumstance in the November 4th Vancouver at Colorado game. So while it is widescreen, it is not HD. That widescreen SD signal is sent back to the network centre via digital link, and upconverted for HD and edge cropped for SD. Again, it is critical that we protect safe area 4x3 in our shooting, and it was here we failed that Saturday night.Response from the CBC on Last Saturday Night's Game, We couldn't see the corners or the second point man on the PP

Watching a not very exciting game between the Colorado Avalanche on Hockey Night in Canada, I noticed that often the puck would not be shown on on or the other side of the screen. Looking around for whether the game was broadcast in HDTV—and not really knowing the difference from HDTV to regular TV, never having experienced the former—I wondered if that's what the game was broadcast in. The link will die so I've attached the schedule here, but apparently the game was broadcast not in HDTV but widescreen. It seems as if the camera operator for the above ice view angled such that the puck, if in one end of the rink, would be on the very edge of the widescreen to show the rest of the offensive zone. This seemed to have the effect of cutting plays for regular-width TV viewers like myself.

Time passes and I run into Darren Barefoot at a book-launching event, and he tells me that he posted to the Canucks Central forum about this. Others experienced it too, but I'm not so sure it was HDTV. Just widescreen, and those who had TVs without widescreen got the shot cropped.