WHAT has happened to the big picture at the 2002 World Cup? That鈥檚 what thousands of football fans who bought widescreen televisions have been phoning their TV stations to find out.
Instead of seeing big, broad pictures of the world鈥檚 best footballers in action, widescreen viewers will watch the final on either a standard TV picture wedged between thick black bands, or short, fat players waddling across the pitch as their set stretches the pictures to fill the screen. No widescreen pictures of the matches have been broadcast outside the host countries, Japan and South Korea.
Most World Cup matches were shot with widescreen TV cameras as well as standard ones, so what went wrong? A 快猫短视频 investigation points to a combination of appalling planning and penny-pinching by the world鈥檚 broadcasters.
Advertisement
Officially, the BBC says that only standard pictures have been available from the World Cup satellite feeds, and blames FIFA, the world鈥檚 football governing body, for this. Unofficially, BBC engineers admit that the corporation鈥檚 forward planning was inadequate.
The commercial ITV network has a similar message to the BBC. 鈥淲e鈥檝e had lots of calls from viewers wanting widescreen,鈥� says a spokeswoman. 鈥淎nd we wanted to show the matches in widescreen. But there鈥檚 only one satellite feed and that carries standard pictures.鈥�
FIFA blames Host Broadcast Services (HBS) of Geneva, the company the world鈥檚 broadcasters appointed to cover the tournament, for the lack of a widescreen picture. But HBS chief executive Francis Tellier says the only reason the main satellite feed carries standard-format pictures is because that is what the broadcasters ordered. 鈥淭he choice to broadcast standard, not widescreen, pictures has been made by the broadcasters around the world, not FIFA or HBS,鈥� he says.
He cites cost as the broadcasters鈥� main reason for this choice. The widescreen format the matches are being shot in is a high-definition format, with 1125 pictures lines per frame. This takes up a lot of satellite capacity, making it expensive to send high-definition pictures around the world to TV studios.
But a little planning would have allowed the broadcasters to 鈥渄ownconvert鈥� the high-definition pictures to widescreen pictures before they were sent around the world by satellite. This would have allowed a 525 or 625-line widescreen signal to be distributed more cheaply by satellite. HBS says no broadcaster took up this option, so only Japan and South Korea are using the high-definition feed.
A further problem that better planning could have ironed out is that the widescreen camera operators weren鈥檛 told to keep vital action in the middle of the widescreen picture. So if a key free kick, say, appeared at the side of a widescreen picture, it would be lost off the edges of an ordinary TV set if the picture had been downconverted.
With one in every three large TV sets sold around the world now a widescreen one, Tellier expects the broadcasters to rethink their widescreen policy before the next World Cup in Germany in 2006. But that will be cold comfort for football fans who wasted their money on expensive widescreen sets this time around.