Last summer, my wife and I built a house out in the country. We’re so far out there that Comcast cable isn’t an option for us, so we had to go with Satellite TV. After comparing and going back and forth, we settled with DISH Network over DirecTV, mostly because of equipment and pricing. Before signing up, I made sure that DISH had NESN and Comcast SportsNet in HD, because obviously if they didn’t offer those channels, it would’ve been a dealbreaker.

So we got it installed, and come to find out, NESN is only in HD for the actual Red Sox and Bruins telecasts, and some of the pre and post-game shows. All the other programming is shown in standard def. I’ve dealt with this, mostly because obviously the most important thing is getting the actual games in HD.

Then the Celtics season started, and it turns out that only the Celtics home games are in HD. The road games and all other programming on CSN is in standard def. Not cool. Still, I dealt with it, mostly because I didn’t have a choice. I commited to a two year contract to get a free HD-DVR. I guess I could break the contract, but I’m too cheap to pay the penalty for doing so.

However, after last night, it might be an option. Last night’s game was shown on both CSN and TNT. However, only the TNT broadcast was in HD. I guess their reasoning is that they don’t want to waste bandwidth by showing the same game on two HD channels, but it still stinks. I obviously had to watch the game on TNT, but I did switch over a few times to CSN to see if Tommy was ranting about particular calls during the game, but overall, I’ve got to say I’m very disappointed with the NESN and CSN offerings from DISH Network.

In an unrelated note, this could have an impact on CSN’s ratings for the games. I think the same situation happened on Saturday, where only the ESPN game was in HD. This would result in at least a small amount of viewers being taken away from CSN, and over to the other network, which is offering the game in HD.

End of rant.

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