Canucks Nation

Watching a not very exciting game between the Colorado Avalanche on Hockey Night in Canada, I noticed that often the puck would not be shown on on or the other side of the screen. Looking around for whether the game was broadcast in HDTV—and not really knowing the difference from HDTV to regular TV, never having experienced the former—I wondered if that's what the game was broadcast in. The link will die so I've attached the schedule here, but apparently the game was broadcast not in HDTV but widescreen. It seems as if the camera operator for the above ice view angled such that the puck, if in one end of the rink, would be on the very edge of the widescreen to show the rest of the offensive zone. This seemed to have the effect of cutting plays for regular-width TV viewers like myself.

Time passes and I run into Darren Barefoot at a book-launching event, and he tells me that he posted to the Canucks Central forum about this. Others experienced it too, but I'm not so sure it was HDTV. Just widescreen, and those who had TVs without widescreen got the shot cropped.