There's an ironclad rule of broadcast, and that is given a choice between the number of channels and the quality, they will pick number of channels every time,

There's an ironclad rule of broadcast, and that is given a choice between the number of channels and the quality, they will pick number of channels every time, meaning users will get low effective quality almost all of the time. Here's a thought experiment to tell you why that is: Say you have a choice of two stations, or streams. One of them is boring, but is of exemplary quality. The other one is fantastically compelling, but sounds mediocre trending poor frankly. Which one do you use, and what do you think other people will do? And the answer really is compelling wins every time. Quality is nice to have, but when more concurrent offerings can be delivered in the same bitstream, the vast majority of broadcasters will do that, because that means more money more ad dollars the whole nine. Here in my market, we have exactly one full definition, full bitrate television broadcast station over-the-air. It looks amazing. The funny thing is, I don't watch that station much at all. Every one of the others has 2, 3 sometimes concurrent streams. And they don't look amazing. In radio, there are a fair number of stations that didn't do the digital system. Of the ones that did, almost all of them have two streams. Same story here, the streams I really like, are low-quality. Such is life. I expect to see similar choice and quality trade-offs all over the place. The only way to bring quality up to exemplary standards would be to mandate it. Otherwise the majority of broadcasters won't do it.