Comcast's 'HD' quality

By Ashok Argent-Katwala

PVRblog points to an interesting and quite thorough comparison of Comcast's recent drop in HD quality, including some pretty damning screen captures.

There's a real problem with defining 'HD' as at least a certain number of dots and damn the compression. Quality is a richer game than that. I think we may also need a THX-style, "does this look crap, call this number", and a meaningful, policed brand that means High-Quality, High-Def. Do content owners care when their programme is beaten up so badly it appears on the consumer's television as a bruised and battered mess?

As the proud owner of a shiny new 1080p screen, I've started caring about quality that little bit more. Seeing well encoded video on it is wonderful. Watching artefacts swirl around on it, on anything other than a talking-heads news broadcast drives me slightly nuts.

Quality is a tricky thing, and it's about perception rather than bitrate. Comcast do have a bitrate problem, as they are trying to jam too many channels into not enough space. But the idea that bigger-file equals better-quality is duff to begin with, it all depends on the encoding. As we move to digital distribution, I'd hope we can get the content out as a perfect copy of what was produced. We could even assure the consumer that they are really getting that, too. I expect that means store-and-forward, rather than streaming for the vast majority of programming, as it means you can borrow the bandwidth from a convenient, quiet time to make sure the pristine copy arrives uninjured.

I've been looking at all the ways to feed the new beast with HD signals. I'm not there yet, but the aim was to buy a new set that will last 10+ years; I expect there will be plenty of 1080p content during that time. The best signals to be fed in so far have been from Usenet, and have looked superb. Compete with that on quality, with some kind of all-you-can-eat service, covering all the programmes I love (or would love if someone just recommended them nicely) and I'll happily pay.