As someone who works in broadcast engineering, I have seen Digital TV come along with great dissapointment. For a start the whole point of digital signals is that they should maintian their levels and not become distorted with each processing stage. This of course only applies if you keep them in the same format as you work with them. The cost of distribution bandwidth is/was high and so it was cheapest to compress a 270Mbit signal down to around 8Mbit, decompress it - work with it in analogue - redigitise it and then recompress it again to send it to the transmitter. Apparently in tests most viewers thought it looked better..(maybe they were drugged?)
What really saddens me is that in the push to go digital, it was all sold on MORE CHANNELS=BETTER . This is so untrue it hurts. The best TV IMO was around when we had just 4 main terrestrial channels. People claim it is all about choice and it reminds me of an old Fry and Laurie sketch where one was a waiter in a resturant and the other the cusotmer who was complaining he had not cutlery. The waiter responds by bringing him piles of plastic knives and forks and then says something like - 'there you have choice'.
I would prefer a narrower choice of a few good channels than an massive range of pap. One of my main choices these days is 'off;
I wish that digital switchover had been HD-only and we had ended up with 8-10 good HD channels on Freeview and (no SD ones) rather than the 30 or so rather mediocre ones. There is only so much talent to go round.
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Digital could be so much better
As someone who works in broadcast engineering, I have seen Digital TV come along with great dissapointment. For a start the whole point of digital signals is that they should maintian their levels and not become distorted with each processing stage. This of course only applies if you keep them in the same format as you work with them. The cost of distribution bandwidth is/was high and so it was cheapest to compress a 270Mbit signal down to around 8Mbit, decompress it - work with it in analogue - redigitise it and then recompress it again to send it to the transmitter. Apparently in tests most viewers thought it looked better..(maybe they were drugged?)
What really saddens me is that in the push to go digital, it was all sold on MORE CHANNELS=BETTER . This is so untrue it hurts. The best TV IMO was around when we had just 4 main terrestrial channels. People claim it is all about choice and it reminds me of an old Fry and Laurie sketch where one was a waiter in a resturant and the other the cusotmer who was complaining he had not cutlery. The waiter responds by bringing him piles of plastic knives and forks and then says something like - 'there you have choice'.
I would prefer a narrower choice of a few good channels than an massive range of pap. One of my main choices these days is 'off;
I wish that digital switchover had been HD-only and we had ended up with 8-10 good HD channels on Freeview and (no SD ones) rather than the 30 or so rather mediocre ones. There is only so much talent to go round.