Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
:erm: PBS would instead intermingle the Olympics with their pledging drives and then show it letterboxes and pillarboxed on a heavily degraded HD feed that shares ~19Mbit/sec with their half dozen other subchannels. No thanks.
In Chicago, the PBS station does four weeks of pledge drives a year, but only during a limited number of hours each day. I suspect only about 5% of the station's broadcast time falls in a pledge period.
We're talking about sports. I'm not seeing a huge need for high definition to begin with. One human or ball-shaped blob crosses a line before other human or ball shaped blobs.
There is a real advantage to HD for arts programming; the quality of the experience really is enhanced for being able to see an actor's facial expressions or the textures of the material on a period costume; can you say that your viewing experience is enhanced because you're able to tell that the fifth-place finisher in men's 500m downhill fall got sweat in his eyes at the 400m mark? If PBS has less capable HD equipment, I certainly don't think it would matter for sports programming.