But that's the whole multiplex, right?
It could be a single channel, but usually you have many in the multiplex. I don't know how it works in the US, but for DVB-T(2) that's how it is.
It could be a single channel, but usually you have many in the multiplex. I don't know how it works in the US, but for DVB-T(2) that's how it is.
Circa 2019, after the FCC "repack" / "incentive auction" (to free-up TV channels for cellular LTE use) it became very common for each RF channel to carry 4+ channels. But to be fair, many broadcasters did purchase new, improved MPEG-2 encoders at that time, which do perform better with a lower bit-rate, so quality didn't degrade by a lot.
These days the FCC is unlikely to care, but I suspect viewership would suffer if any of the major broadcast networks downgraded their "main channel" signal to SD.
This explains the typical arrangement, as well as listing some of the extreme cases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subchannel#United_Stat...