Here’s some logrolling at its finest….Michael David Smith over at AOL Fanhouse, whom I’ve spoken highly of on a number of occasions, has some comments about a really sharp article criticizing the amateur porn level production quality of the HD Net US broadcast of DREAM.3:

I’m not quite prepared to go that far — I saw some 1980s pro wrestling shows that looked like they were being broadcast by a guy standing in his basement with a camcorder — but HDNet’s work is, from a technical perspective, clearly inferior to the product UFC puts out.

Even if you forgive HDNet for cutting costs by not sending its announcers to Japan, they could have done a better job of giving home viewers the feel of being there, they could have shown the clock to let viewers know how much time was left in each round, and Bas Rutten could have seemed like he cared more about the fights. It was a disappointing effort for HDNet.

He is, of course, commenting on the article I posted on the subject earlier today…..I didn’t even mention the failure of HDNet to even put a clock graphic on the screen in the article (though I did on my play by play). It made it a real pain in the ass to do the live coverage when I had to listen for Lene Hardt’s in arena time cues (which were barely audible due to–you guessed it–the poor sound sampling of the live crowd) or else wait for those occasions when the announcers were paying enough attention to give the time remaining in the round. Again, why they didn’t just use the TBS graphic with the time is beyond me. Maybe they figured that they use different minutes and seconds in Japan…

Mark Cuban’s HDNet has work to do on production quality of MMA broadcasts @ AOL Fanhouse