Does HDTV ruin "compatible" NTSC broadcasts?

[wkulecz]

Is it just me and my local CBS station?

CBS is broadcasting NFL games in HDTV, I've noticed the quality of the image is poor on the over the air channel as carried by my local TW cable system. Studio shots and comercials look good as ever.

Next week, if you watch the CBS game, look for "mosquito noise" in the grass on wide field view shots. The digits of score or time inserts seem to also show really obnoxious artifacts.

Appeares to me the fractional HDTV being broadcast live as NTSC is resulting in rather poor quality NTSC signals. So far I've only noticed this on CBS.

Stayed at the Radison in Portland, OR. again this trip and their in room "digital satallite" system was again a poster boy for MPEG artifacts. My local TW digital channles like MTV2 and VH1 classic also seem to be rather poor qualtity encodings. CNN and TNN were of a quality that I found appauling and if people aren't bitching about it something is very wrong!

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

Yup, "digital" TV is often the victim of MPEG artifacting. This is often caused by the channel not allocating enough bandwidth for the program type and/or using half or 2/3 D1 instead of a full frame signal. None of these are good for sports programming but work good for talking heads.

Dr. Mordrid

[Sciascia]

If both HDTV and the regular NTSC signal are coming from the same source via satellite, which they probably are, they probably don't have a big enough pipe for both. We just ran into a similar probelm expanding our service from 4 to six channels in the same bandwidth and sports are the biggest tell-tale sign that you don't have enough. Watching football at the beginning of the season would give you a headache. They finally re-allocated the bandwidth a little better and got the compression down a little better, but it s still bad during panning with a lot of jerkiness. My point has been what is the point of providing more service if they all look bad. Of course there have been major improvements overall and it is still a growing process.

Sounds like someone needs to point out to your affiliate that the service is not acceptable and that the HDTV audience is still rather small. If people stop watching their broadcast, especially during big marketing times like sporting events, they will lose sponsors as ratings fall. You know as well as I do that there is usually another game on at the same time. Advertisement is the commercial television lifeblood. It doesn't matter how good that HDTV picture looks if they aren't making any money.

[wkulecz]

I pretty much only watch the playoffs of most sports, the one time there is usually not another game on at the same time :-(

--wally.