And the real killer here is that on-the-fly compression is much worse than production-time compression. A movie on HBO or a TV series episode that's compressed by the provider can be fairly good even with heavy compression -- lots of time to do 50 or 100 cycles to make the bitrate low. But when you do it at transmission time you do it in real time and at is often atrifact city.
AT&T will eventually have to give up on the DSL thing -- the copper last mile has got to go. Maybe they don't worry about Verizon overbuilding, but DirecTV will beat their quality every time.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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And the real killer here is that on-the-fly compression is much worse than production-time compression. A movie on HBO or a TV series episode that's compressed by the provider can be fairly good even with heavy compression -- lots of time to do 50 or 100 cycles to make the bitrate low. But when you do it at transmission time you do it in real time and at is often atrifact city.
AT&T will eventually have to give up on the DSL thing -- the copper last mile has got to go. Maybe they don't worry about Verizon overbuilding, but DirecTV will beat their quality every time.