A lot of sports contests in America, including the current NFL football season, are carried not by national networks coast-to-coast as much as by regional networks (often owned by the national TV networks) that don't always carry the games in HD. That's proving to be frustrating to some new large-screen owners who may have assumed nearly all games were in HD.
For example, only four of the Cleveland Browns' 14 games played this season have been available in HD regionally, and last year it wasn't much better for Browns fans, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Even for households that pay premium fees for extra sports content, such as DirecTV's "NFL Sunday Ticket" package, while each week's game is available, for the Browns (and other teams) the games are seldom in HD. Other sports, including baseball and basketball, suffer the same dearth of HD when the content is coming from regional networks. "The industry has done a pretty poor job," Fox Sports Networks COO Randy Freer told The Wall Street Journal. "There's a fair amount of confusion in the marketplace."
