Ok, old geezer here. I do remember not being able to watch Rocket games on TV (only road games were televised in Houston on ch 39) Home games were either listened to on radio or you went to the Summit to watch them. One thing I noticed a couple of years ago on a visit to Laptop, at halftime I visited the camera platform, the cameras they use are really small (at least I thought so)and the entire platform is surrounded by plexiglass. The cameras must shoot through the plexiglass to broadcast the game. This has to effect the quality of the picture. My suggestion would be to take down the plexiglass to allow a clear view for the cameras. An upgrade in equipment is a must as well.
Fox Sports Net ALWAYS has shoddy VQ. I'm assuming that the road games are done by the FSN crew, but just delivered into the UPN package. Ala the Astros Ch. 51 games. FSN always has some sorry ass/cheap cameras or production.
There are a tremendous number of elements that go into broadcasting high-quality images. I have got to believe the cameras and broadcast equipment in Compaq are at least 7 to 10 years old. As with any technology industry, the changes and improvements made just in the past ten years are pretty phenominal. As Tim said (and he's right), they want to be careful. Cameras like this cost tens of thousands of dollars a piece. They could spend several million just on cameras for the new arena and that doesn't count the actual broadcast equipment. Just a REALLY rough guess, buy I'll bet there will be between $10 million and $20 million worth of video and audio broadcasting equipement investment in the new building.
It just seems that annually the Rockets pay out an annual salary of at least 50 Million dollars, plus millions more for other personel to attempt creating a great product. Generally all this effort is to display your great product on TV. Considering the above you would think that every effort would be made to make sure that the end result (viewing quality) is as decent as possible. It just stands to reason. If the equipment is 10 years old then even a large sum of 20 million dollars (if its actually that high) would be 2 million per year or less than 4% of the players salaries.
