Lack of Bandwidth Oversight Damages HDTV Quality

mattnyc99 writes "Over at Popular Mechanics, Glenn Derene has a great new column investigating the lawless lands of broadcast television, where the quality of the picture that ends up on your expensive hi-def set is determined by a bunch of fuzzy math. Quoting: 'In fact, there's no real regulation over high-definition picture quality at all — "none whatsoever," one industry consultant told me. And that's part of the reason why different HD stations often have wildly varying levels of picture quality that change from one moment to the next. Behind the scenes, content producers, broadcasters and cable and satellite providers are engaged in a constant tug-of-war over bandwidth and video quality, with no hard metrics to even define what looks acceptable. Even officials at HBO, where Generation Kill looks pretty fantastic on my TV, bemoaned the lack of a silver bullet ... for now.'"

Comments

What's that smell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Smells like a convenient excuse for the likes of Comcast and Verizon to use in an attempt to get the public on their side of the net neutrality debate.

"If you don't let us manage the network bandwidth, you'll be doomed to watching fuzzy video on your expensive HDTV!!!!"

Re:HD channels w/ no HD programming

[rob1980]

Marketing's a bitch, isn't it. Cable and satellite providers are poking at each other in advertisements over who has more HD channels when they could be a little bit more forthcoming and compete over a completely different metric, like how many hours of HD programming are provided per week or something.

I completely agree

[YesIAmAScript]

Secondary channels should be banned. The local NBC affiliate runs a weather channel on their .2 and it their image quality is very poor next to the local CBS affiliate (CBS bans secondary channels). And woe to me if I try to watch the .2-.5 channels on PBS. Even in SD they are block city.

I disagree Generation Kill looks good. I watched the first episode on HBOW, which is an H.264 channel on DirecTV. And it had significant blocking. The 2nd episode looked better, but still, I am spoiled by BluRay. It's worlds better, and no cable or satellite system which only allocates a few mbits is doing to ever match it. That includes U-Verse.

I'm watching "The Professionals" on BluRay right now, and the video bandwidth along is over 27mbits, even in scenes where almost nothing moves. On pans it goes over 30mbits. And this isn't even one of the best looking movies. And this 27mbits is with H.264 video (AVC). 8-10mbit H.264 (let along MPEG-2) doesn't stand a chance.

Broadcast companies (and cable systems) will keep removing bandwidth until their "HDTV" looks even worse than it already does. They advertise quantity (100 channels!), quality is rarely even mentioned.

Re:I completely agree

[Percy_Blakeney]

Secondary channels should be banned.

I completely disagree -- each company should get to decide how to allocate their bandwidth. I would prefer to have two channels of good content instead of a single channel, and I'll bet that most consumers would agree with me. There's a reason why they advertise quantity instead of quality -- it's what people actually care about.

Of course, there's a point where most people DO care about quality -- stuffing 15 sub-channels into a 19 Mbps broadcast channel is going to piss people off -- but you probably aren't going to hit that point with just 2-3 channels.

Re:I completely agree

[superdave80]

"I would prefer to have two channels of good content instead of a single channel..."

But they have HUNDREDS of channels, and probably only enough decent content for a fraction of those channels. This looks like the MHz wars all over again.

Cable guy 1:"We have a ZILLION channels!"

Cable guy 2:"Oh, yeah, we a GAZILLION channels!!!!"

Consumer (flipping through a bazillion channels): "Shit. Nothing good on tv tonight."

typical

[ocularDeathRay]

The funny thing is that people still seem to like HDTV.... you know why? because it _IS_ better than the picture quality we had before.

I professionally install home theater systems, and most of our customers are very happy with the end result. I get what this article is going for (not that I read it, or anything), and I wish it could be better, but unfortunately the world of business never comes up with anything that is perfect... because to develop perfect tech would cost infinite money, which would significantly cut into profits.

take any technology standard and leave it to a bunch of linux geeks (myself included) to pick it apart and point out the flaws. sometimes I think our time could be better spent designing something better, rather than badmouthing that which already exists.

OTOH it is kind of fun to bitch, so I am torn...

Simple solution

[PPH]

When the carrier (cable or satellite) changes the program material provided to them in any way, they need to make their editorial changes clear to the viewer.

To the following message:

This program has been modified for content, time allocated and to fit your screen.

They need to add:

This program has been reduced in resolution to fit on our cheap cable system.

Re:HD channels w/ no HD programming

[lessthanpi]

It always seems the highest quality video you get from these "HD" channels is the commercials. Viva America