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Comment by yborg | Hacker News Reader

I'd question the better image quality part of this, almost all broadcast providers have chosen to use their bandwidth to ship the maximum number of 480p subchannels.

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You can question, or you can do the A/B test yourself and no longer have it as a question. Sure, they've sub-divided their bandwidth, but their flagship station still receives much more bandwidth than your cable provider.

Just do the Amazon rental for a weekend. If you don't like it, return it. You'll see the difference.

This is very much a regional thing.

After the repack many markets have multiple HD channels sharing the bandwidth previously allocated for one OTA HD channel. In addition, as ATSC 3 is being deployed these channel sharing agreements are only becoming more common.

In addition, some cable providers are taking this over-compressed feed and compressing it further.

In many situations, streaming is the best option for picture quality now.

I did some comparisons in the Philadelphia market: https://www.somesortofweatherexperiment.com/tags/tv-source-p...

Even flagship events like the Super Bowl are not exempt to from low detail, compression artifact video in this market.

I haven't been near broadcast engineering since the DTV transition, but at one point in time, they wanted to have dial-a-yield type of abilities for the splitting of the bandwidth. For primetime, they wanted to to be able to give the main channel a larger portion of the bandwidth when people were watching, and then during the day provide more options for people to view alternate programming. Even if you gave each of the .2-.X channels 3Mbps, that's still a lot of bandwidth in comparison for the .1 channel. Of course any live realtime encoding of 3Mbps will never rival a 3Mbps encode from someone like Netflix, but a lot of that is just SD content anyways so meh it gets.

Yeah it’s all VBR (statmux) and they do make manual adjustments around special events. But at this point, in this market, there are multiple “.1” channels sharing the same physical channel. They are just out of bits.

When NBC last broadcast the Super Bowl there were two 1080i broadcasts (NBC and Telemundo) of the same game sharing the same physical channel (along with some sub channels). It was borderline unwatchable IMO.

I’m sure the situation isn’t as dire in all TV markets, but I think we are looking back on the days during which we could unilaterally state that OTA provides the best picture quality.

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