OTA uses the 8VSB modulation standard, which provides about 19 mbit/sec of payload. If your station is not broadcasting any subchannels it's a VERY nice signal

OTA uses the 8VSB modulation standard, which provides about 19 mbit/sec of payload. If your station is not broadcasting any subchannels it's a VERY nice signal. (It's still compressed with MPEG-2, the raw bitrate of a 1080p video is over 1Gbit/sec) Unfortunately most channels in my market are sending 3-4 subchannels which knocks down the quality of the primary. AFAIK only Fox broadcasts a single stream (and football looks pretty freaking great there). Yes, the cable and dish operators recompress the MPEG-2 stream into whatever they are broadcasting and they do it at a lower quality to cram more channels into their pipe.