Re: ESPN2 - Virtual Pairing - Pretty damn clever

I couldn't agree more. It is absolutely stupid to have an event with
Tiger, Vijay, Ernie, and Phil playing, and be treated to two hours of
Duffy Waldorf, because of the luck of the tee time draw. It would be
a huge help to the ratings to show all of the top dozen or so players,
along with crowd favorites like JD and JB, regardless of how well they
are playing.

There's even a better solution, all due to the advent of digital
network broadcasting:

With digital, a network such as CBS has a bunch of bandwidth. They can
use that bandwidth however they like. They can use their bandwidth to
broadcast High Def, or they can break it up into subchannels and
broadcast 4 or 5 things at once.

CBS has been doing this for the NCAA Basketball brackets. During the
first 2 or 3 rounds, when there was 4 games going on at once, their
main channel would broadcast the biggest game, and their subchannels
would broadcast the other games. If you have an ATSC tuner (or high
def cable) you can pick whichever one you want.

So my idea is this: Have the main CBS channel show the tournament as
you normally would, but on the subchannels, have 2 camera men follow
around either the top players in the world, or the guys who are
leading, for each subchannel. So 2 guys would follow tiger, 2 for
phil, 2 for ernie. You could watch a player's entire round from start
to finish (they could easily tape delay it), uncut. Throw a mic on the
cameraman (with a 10 second delay for Tiger!), and you could hear the
conversation between player and caddie for every shot.

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