Hey All,

I can't help but notice that every single NASCAR event is in HD now. Not a fan of NASCAR, but good for those of you that are. I am, however, a big fan of kicking back on the weekend for an hour or two and watching some PGA Tour golf - especially this time of year.

Can someone please tell me why NASCAR is in HD and the similarly structured, advertiser-logo driven PGA Tour is not? So far, in a year and 5 months of owning my HDTV, I've seen one golf event in HD, and it wasn't even an official PGA Tour event, it was the Masters. Granted, it's the best tourney of the year, but that's the only HD golf all frickin year long.

These companies (for both sports) pay so much money to place advertising on everything that gets touched during the event. It makes no sense to me, from an advertiser standpoint, why they wouldn't insist on better resolution for their product placements.

I'm seriously considering finding out who the advertiser contacts are for some of the major PGA Tour sponsors and contacting them to complain about this.

Final case in point: I'm watching Phil Mikelson play a couple weeks ago at the Honda Classic. Ford has paid him mucho dinero to place a Ford logo on his shirt. On my TV in standard definition, however, it looks like Pfizer has paid him even more money to glue a Viagra pill to his shirt. The Ford logo was completely washed out. Where's the value in that??

Purely a guess, but I would suspect that golf pulls a somewhat older audience demographic that, overall, isn't into HDTV yet. Hence the ads for Cadillac and investment firms and such. NASCAR, on the other hand.....

I feel your pain. I want more HD content everywhere really. I think golf would look great in HD.

I suspect your right, but I have to question that mentality. Why just throw in the towl and resign yourself to the least attractive marketing segment. There are millions of thirty and forty-somethings out there that spend billions on golf related merchandise and other PGA sponsored products.

An advertiser logo-driven sport such as golf shouldn't be the last on a high resolution bandwagon! Hell, I've even seen taco eating contests and sumo wrestling in high definition.

What's the point of investing hundreds of thousands of dollars so that a bunch of pros play your brand of golf ball........nobody's gonna see it.

At the VERY least, do the other three majors in high def. Lets at least make some progress here instead of another year with one event in HD.

This is something that I face here in Canada a lot.

Now, I am NOT a fan of Nascar, but there are far more Nascar fans out there then there are NON-Nascar fans, so when it comes to showing things in HD, Nascar gets the nod.

It's all about Market share. If they can get 10 million viewers for Nascar HD and only 3 - 4 million for Golf in HD, then they are going to show Nascar everytime.

It's all about the $$$, as much as you and I hate it.

I face the same sort of thing with watching hockey here in Ottawa where I live. The CBC has rights to carry all NHL on a Saturday night. SO instead of watching Ottawa and Buffalo duke it out for a play-off position, CBC shows Toronto vs. the Rangers in a game that means essentially nothing.

And if the leafs AREN'T playing but the Sens ARE, because CBC has the rights to the game, they can choose not to show it, and then NO ONE gets to show it.

Why does this happen? Because CBC looks at Marketshare of the ratings and viewership. They seems to think that the Leafs loosing will draw more watchers then the Sens winning.

Again, it's all about the $$$

It's also got to do with the equipment load, too. Events like Nascar, basketball, and football, only need a few cameras, set in fixed positions, to record in HD. Golf, however, has a buttload of cameras, all over the place. Those puppies are expensive, and not all that portable, yet, so the channels that primarily show golf don't have 10+ HD cameras. They only have a couple. Hence the reason you can watch 1 basketball game on ESPN in HD, but yet the very next game in another location will be in standard definition. Nobody wants to fork over the money, yet, to buy all new cameras for everything.

It's frustrating, and I don't even watch golf!

There are times, though, that golf is broadcast in HD on the HNNet channel on the Dish Network. It's not very often, though.

they tryin to git ya'll rich folk wit the HDTV to watch more NASCAR cause us rednecks aint got HDTV.
they make more money if people with HDTV watch it because they have HDTV and they can watch it in HDTV becuase they have an HDTV.