Why is my game not in HD? It's supposed to be.

The hot topic of the weekend among high-end TV users in the Kansas City area concerned a certain local basketball team and the HD telecast of its game that wasn't HD.

John Williams wrote, "Can you find out from KCTV and explain to many of us disgruntled viewers why every NCAA game except KU is broadcast in High Definition?  There seems to be an excuse about providing us the game from tip-off to completion.  But, the KU game on Friday night from Chicago was not shown in HD, but the following game from the same venue was.  This makes no sense and it is really frustrating."

I didn't have to wait for KCTV's offices to open Monday morning — I know why the KU game was shown in standard def.

The first thing to know is that the KU-Niagara game was not chosen by CBS for its main network coverage, except for the first couple of minutes.  (Which is about how long the contest between a #1 seed and the play-in game winner ought to be.)

If a station, in this case KCTV, wishes to pre-empt the main network feed, it is free to do so. However, like almost many other mid-market non-network-owned affiliates across the country, KCTV has yet to plunk down $2 million to make the in-house transition to HD.  Yes, it can carry a network HD feed — that's known as "pass-through" — but the station cannot produce locally in anything but standard definition.  Therefore ANYTIME it wants to disrupt the national feed it must downconvert the signal to SD.  This happens every hour, on the hour, when KCTV-5 is legally obliged to air its station ID on the HD channel.  The picture goes standard def for a few seconds while the ID is shown.

So until KCTV-5 upgrades its equipment to broadcast locally in HD, this will happen.  While less than acceptable for the HD viewer, it is also commonplace across the country