As someone who works in the field of broadcast television engineering I can say from first-hand experience that broadcast groups and owners are working to try and find some form of revenue stream from their (relatively) new DTV transmitters and you can expect more of the same picture quality degradation forthcoming.
In fact, when broadcasters settle on a winning mobile technology from the Open Mobile Video Coalition even more bits (between 4Mb and 5Mb) will be torn away from the primary (sometimes HD) channel and any other channels muxed into the stream.
In addition, there are datacasting providers like Building-B.com that look to grab bits from broadcasters in an attempt to create an improved form of the now-dead USDTV service.
It would not surprise me in the least if you see 1080i get swapped for 720p to allow the broadcasters more headroom for these endeavors in the somewhat near future.
Right now the over-the-air DTV broadcast is usually more robust than the molested, bit-rate reduced version on cable or satellite. As these new broadcast services roll out six months to a year from now the reverse may be true as the station could provide a higher bit-rate version via fiber to the cable head-end while squashing (multiplexing) HD, SD, Mobile Video and Pay TV/Data to fit in the 19.39Mbit pipe out the digital transmitter.
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As someone who works in the field of broadcast television engineering I can say from first-hand experience that broadcast groups and owners are working to try and find some form of revenue stream from their (relatively) new DTV transmitters and you can expect more of the same picture quality degradation forthcoming.
In fact, when broadcasters settle on a winning mobile technology from the Open Mobile Video Coalition even more bits (between 4Mb and 5Mb) will be torn away from the primary (sometimes HD) channel and any other channels muxed into the stream.
In addition, there are datacasting providers like Building-B.com that look to grab bits from broadcasters in an attempt to create an improved form of the now-dead USDTV service.
It would not surprise me in the least if you see 1080i get swapped for 720p to allow the broadcasters more headroom for these endeavors in the somewhat near future.
Right now the over-the-air DTV broadcast is usually more robust than the molested, bit-rate reduced version on cable or satellite. As these new broadcast services roll out six months to a year from now the reverse may be true as the station could provide a higher bit-rate version via fiber to the cable head-end while squashing (multiplexing) HD, SD, Mobile Video and Pay TV/Data to fit in the 19.39Mbit pipe out the digital transmitter.