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> One of the interesting things I've noticed is that (around here at least) the over-the-air TV is much higher quality than the local providers (cable and fiber
by jpmattia 5y ago
> One of the interesting things I've noticed is that (around here at least) the over-the-air TV is much higher quality than the local providers (cable and fiber).
There's a substantial difference in bitrate between OTA broadcast (for the main channel) and the cable broadcast. Typical cable will stat-mux several channels down to well below 10 Mbps/channel. Main OTA tends to be around 15 Mbps (for a different encoding) but not stat-muxed. So to some extent, the quality of the channel you're watching on cable/fiber depends on what is going on in the adjacent channels.
- matmatmatmat 5y agoCloser to 20 Mbps, even, for a full-bandwidth OTA broadcast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards.
- MrRadar 5y agoThough most broadcast stations have sub-channels which eat some of that bandwidth. In my market, almost every station broadcasts at least 3 video channels. A few of them even manage to squeeze 6(!) into their 20 megabits (which would be fine with modern codecs, but ASTC 1.0 is stuck with MPEG-2).