Television and Radio Coverage
The game was televised in the United States on NBC and in Canada on CBC and RDS. Westwood One broadcast the game on radio, and XM Satellite Radio aired the game, as well. Some NBC affiliates in the United States decided instead to play the game on secondary channels often used for weather service. Therefore, in some markets, fans with satellite service with DirecTV or DISH Network were unable to watch the game. Despite this, and competing with broadcasts of college football bowl games (this was particularly noted in the Detroit, Michigan market, usually a strong market for hockey ratings, where the Wolverines were playing in the Capital One Bowl), the game garnered a 2.6 rating and 5 share, the highest rating for a regular season NHL game since 1996, and the highest share since Wayne Gretzky's final game in 1999, in a near tie with second-place CBS's 2.7 rating for Gator Bowl coverage. The production earned a 38.1 rating in Buffalo and 17.7 rating in Pittsburgh, to lead all markets.
Westwood One carried a nationwide radio broadcast of the game, as did each team's local announcing team for local networks (Rick Jeanneret and Harry Neale for Buffalo, Mike Lange and Phil Bourque for Pittsburgh).
NBC had an airplane flying overhead to provide bird's-eye views of the rink, including a live webstream from its camera throughout the game. The announcers stood in a constructed perch on the penalty box side of the rink, in front of the stadium stands. Mike Emrick, Eddie Olczyk and Darren Pang comprised the TV broadcast team for NBC, while Jim Hughson, Craig Simpson and Greg Millen called the game on CBC.
Read more about this topic: 2008 NHL Winter Classic
Famous quotes containing the words television and/or radio:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“The radio ... goes on early in the morning and is listened to at all hours of the day, until nine, ten and often eleven o’clock in the evening. This is certainly a sign that the grown-ups have infinite patience, but it also means that the power of absorption of their brains is pretty limited, with exceptions, of course—I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. One or two news bulletins would be ample per day! But the old geese, well—I’ve said my piece!”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)