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Comcast Puts the Screws To HDTV
Todd Spangler writes "Comcast, like every video distributor, compresses its digital video signals. But to fit in more HDTV channels, Comcast is squeezing some signals more than others. The cable operator claims it is using improved compression techniques, so that most subscribers won't see any drop-off in picture quality. But A/V buff Ken Fowler claims the differences between some of Comcast's more highly compressed channels and Verizon's FiOS TV are indeed noticeable. He's posted his comparative test results on AVSForum.com — and the results are not pretty."
The problem is, of course, that they are trying to transmit all of their hundreds of channels to your TV simultaneously, and let the decoder pick out the interesting bits. If they only sent the one that you were watching, there wouldn't be a problem.
Of course, then they'd have to discard their outmoded business model. So that won't happen. They'll just be marginalised and discarded in favour of internet distribution. It's the same thing that's happening to newspapers and bookstores - still around, but becoming less relevant every year.
Cue their attempts to get laws passed to ban the new competition...
But what I find the most frightening is looking at the pictures in the article I quoted, and then realising that "These images were rescaled to half-resolution". Imagine how coarse they must look at twice the size if a downscaling doesn't produce anything more smooth than that.
I'm starting to rediscover my love for that ~15 year old 14" CRT thing I have in my room.
What? Consumers aren't allowed to criticize a service they pay for when they notice other competing services provide better quality? What world do you live in? Nowhere did I say it was *easy*, I said it was possible, given money and desire to provide BETTER service than your competitors.
And for your information, I have provided city-wide Internet, TV and phone service before. No, not millions, but Comcast doesn't operate at that level either, if you had any clue as to how they actually operate. Most of their services operate sub-regionally, in loosely grouped clusters of service areas. They are moving in the direction of combining their service zones, which according to anyone familiar with basic economic theory would understand should decrease their cost of service, meaning more money in their coffers which should enable them to perform service upgrades mentioned by myself and others.
Why not ? Because Sweden is not in North America.
I honestly don't know much about Sweden (despite a few visits), but I think it is safe to assume your telecommunications providers are nowhere near as enormous, corrupt and heavy-handed as American ones. There is no competition at all in North America, everyone just gouges like mad, and when an independent tries to push out better services and/or lower prices, they get sued into oblivion or often times bought out and destroyed.
If there were some form of harsh punishment for such blatant abuse of the capitalist system, maybe things would be better for everyone here, but the people drafting the rules are on the receiving end of significant lobbying from the telecoms, so it won't happen anytime soon.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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:-/
This stupid dickering over population density and whatall manages to totally miss the point. In the U.S. there IS NO FREE MARKET for telco. Not even close. In which case, inertia is the biggest culprit, which explains why a very significant minority of the populous STILL can't get anything better (bandwidth/latency-wise) than freakin' dialup. The 'last-mile' problem exists for the same reason. When there is one telephone company and one cable company in town (in some cases they are one and the same), there is absolutely NO reason why that company would roll out last-mile fiber. The CEOs of those companies would be flogged by the shareholders for even suggesting what would be perceived as an unnecessary and costly venture. It is a chicken-and-egg scenario for a lot of companies. For the majority of internet users, anything beyond bare-bones 1024/256 DSL is really not necessary. People would likely find a use for it if it existed, but don't demand the upgrade in infrastructure because it is a white elephant ATM.
For example, I live 18 miles from the nearest town, and get 1024/256 DSL by pure accident because I live on a well-traveled highway. Us lucky folks get to watch streaming video without hiccups. Our modem-bound neighbors a mile to the north have no such luxury.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Popular brands have more failures. You are reading it as "Popular brands have a higher failure rate" which is not necessarily true and not even close to what he was saying. If I sell a product with a 1% failure rate and sell 6 million units I am almost definitely going to have MORE FAILURES than the shitty product with a 50% failure rate if they only sell 5,000 units