Washington, D.C. (July 5, 2012) -- Some cynics occasionally suggest that viewers don't really care if a show is broadcast in High-Definition or standard-definition. But when the BBC's high-def picture of yesterday's Wimbledon match between Andy Murray and David Ferrer went blank, hundreds of fans rallied to their social media sites to register protests.

According to the BBC's web site, the HD signal was lost for about 10 minutes during a tie-break. While the standard-definition signal was still available, that did not satisfy the nation's tennis fans.

"Who's stolen BBC HD?" said Neil Scully on Twitter, the BBC site reports.

"When will the HD picture return?" demanded another Twitter user.

The picture returned after the 10-minute outage, but it was a SD signal. And that just set HD fans off even more.

But about an hour after the HD picture first went blank, it returned and tennis viewers could sit back and enjoy the sport the way it was meant to be seen from home.

"Murray is now even uglier and angrier than normal (in HD)," tweeted Jamie Grace.

The BBC did not explain why it lost the HD picture, but the network got a crash course in why it's bad idea to do so.

There was also no report of NBC losing its HD picture in the U.S. during the outage.