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Breakfast Topic: Are You Ready for Some Football?
It was sort of lost in the shuffle between Love Is in the Air and the fact that we're technically not a sports blog, but this weekend featured one of the biggest events in American sporting, the Super Bowl. Believe it or not, even some of us uber geeks here at WoW.com's world headquarters like sports. Some of us even watched the Super Bowl. Some of us even watched it for a reason other than the commercials. (And honestly, the commercials sucked this year. Except the Google one. That made me melt and go all gooey and squeal with warm fuzzies.) Anyhow, it was a good game, if not the best Super Bowl I've seen in years. But what it really got me thinking of was Warcraft football. Believe it or not, football in Warcraft is totally canon. If you don't believe me, you should watch the end credits for Warcraft III. With that in mind, I got to thinking about what an Azerothian football league might look like, what cities and villages would field teams, and who'd win the superbowl.
Level 3 to deliver uncompressed HD broadcast from Super Bowl XLIV
We're still not sure if this has any noticeable result on picture quality, but Level 3 has announced its going to assist in delivering Super Bowl XLIV's feed uncompressed from the site back to CBS headquarters in New York. Instead of being compressed onsite in a production truck then sent to the studio and stations where it's compressed again, this could help CBS bring a more high quality signal home. If you've been watching Denver Broncos home games, you've seen Level 3's Vyvx broadcast network at work, we'll see how beautiful it keeps things looking in Miami on Sunday.
Poll: Best HD sporting event this month?
Yeah we know March has laid claim to the Madness title, but for such a short month the sports lineup for February is out of control. Kicking off with Winter X Games 14 this weekend and leading into the Super Bowl, Daytona 500 and Winter Olympics there's more than enough reasons for us to stay inside and out of the cold than ever. So which event are you most excited to see? %Poll-41022%
Totally blow out the big game! Part V: Super Bowl XLIV
Sure, the Wall Street Journal says there's only 11 minutes of actual action in every NFL game, but on Super Bowl Sunday we'll be prepped to catch every one of them -- and all the commercials, play stoppages and halftime shows in between -- in the best quality possible. The Colts and Saints both came close to racking up undefeated regular season records but missed, due either to lackluster play and late season injuries or just a decision to play Curtis Painter. While that means the '72 Dolphins get to hang onto a glorious past for one more year, these pass-happy offenses of the future are expected to light up the scoreboard all night and we'll need to make sure our equipment is up to par for a 2010 Super Bowl experience.
CBS lays out its HD broadcast plan for Super Bowl XLIV
We're still working out our attack plan for the Super Bowl but CBS is more than ready for the big game with a significantly larger outlay of cameras and equipment than it brings to regular season games. Broadcasting & Cable learned from VP of engineering, operations and production services Ken Aagaard that its setup is "eerily similar" to the one CBS used for SB XLI two years ago, upping the number of HD cameras to 50 from 48 including a healthy mix of manned, unmanned handheld, fixed, RF and super-slo-mo setups among them. New for 2010 are cameras capable of up to 450 fps for replays, plus "HyperZoom" graphics tracking to magnify the smallest details of a play -- like whether or not Meachem made that catch in overtime -- a new virtual system to extend the goalposts upwards on field goals and an impressive network of servers for replays.
