The recent backlash against certain cable providers compressing their high-def signals has gotten so great that the AP even ran a story on it:

HD enthusiasts crying foul over cable TV's crunched signals

The story focuses on Brent Swanson (above), a Minneapolis HD aficionado with a home theater set-up that seems on par with a My Home 2.0 makeover.

But according to the article, "when he tuned in Sci Fi HD for a recent episode [of Battlestar Galactica] filmed in high definition, the image was soft and the darkest parts broke up into large blocks with no definition. Explosions, he said, were just dull."  

"It kind of looked like they took the standard definition and just blew it up," said Swanson, a 33-year-old graphic designer and videographer who subscribes to Comcast Corp.'s TV service. "I couldn't really tell if what I was seeing was really better than what I saw on regular television."

The problem comes from cable companies trying to pack more HD channels into their already-strained bandwidth capacities, since "compressing the signal is cheaper than costly infrastructure upgrades to increase capacity."

By contrast, "Verizon does not compress its HD signals, and delivers exactly what the content owners such as NBC, Lifetime and ESPN send to us via satellite," according to a recent blog post by Verizon's Eric Rabe.

Posted by Jim 2.0 | tagged: bandwidth, compare, FiOS, HD, TV