Was it? I thought HBO was a cable channel, which of course is streamed and compressed, but TV has always been streamed and compressed (even in analog days - 422

Was it? I thought HBO was a cable channel, which of course is streamed and compressed, but TV has always been streamed and compressed (even in analog days - 422 is compression standard as it throws away a ton of chroma, interlacing is compression as it throws away half the data, both rely on the brain to recover), so I assume you're talking about unicast streaming. I'm sure it would have looked fine if it was streaming at 20mbit. In the UK, the DPP sets contribution bitrates for close-to-tx programs* HD are 45mbit h264 or 60mbit mpeg2 for live contribution, if you have to compress it (clearly 1.5gbit is preferred), and for UHD I think it's 90Mbit h265. Those bitrates are set to assume another compression layer, but I suspect if that episode had gone out on say BBC One HD it would have been running at 15mbit+ for the entire time. * Game of Thrones I suspect would be classed as a close-to-tx delviery to reduce chances of leaks - certainly I know a broadcaster in Austrialia was receiving it on an NTT decoder over an MPLS from their LA office rather than as a file)