Digital Home Thoughts: The HDTV 'Scam'

"If you all don't remember way back in 2004 a DirecTV customer filed lawsuit saying that he had signed up for HDTV service and was soon getting sub-par results. He claims DirecTV is engaged in unlawful or fraudulent business practices by not delivering actual high definition signals. As most of us in the audio/videophille world know DirecTV started cutting bit rate and then scaling down the resolution of their HD feeds to squeeze more bandwidth. This quickly became known as "HD-Lite" in videophille circles. The drop in bit rate resulted in exacerbated MPEG2 mosquito noise, and posterization. DirecTV's odd 1280x1080i feeds resulted in a softening of the image as the horizontal detail was lost and then stretched back out at the satellite receiver to 1920x1080. This fella's lawsuit finally came up on the docket on September 20th when a judge ruled against DirecTV's request for arbitration, meaning that this will at some point go to court and be settled by a battle of lawyers. This lawsuit raises an interesting question: Just what constitutes high definition television?"

Those of us here that get HDTV feeds know just what that DirecTV customer feels. In order to offer us more and more HD content over the same lines, sattelite and cable companies both compress the bejeesus out of their signals. The result is 'high-def' content that's often lower than DVD resolution. While I don't particularly experience the low bitrate and posterization problem, what I do have isn't that much better. I have a perfectly clear and crisp HD feed 99.9% of the time. Every once in a while though the picture will blank while the sound stutters, or a two-inch band will shift through the actors' faces, or (my personal favorite :roll: ) a split-second ear-splitting shriek will come from the audio signal. What about you? Do you get a nice HD signal, or HD-lite, or something else? Tell us about your HD or not-so-HD experiences.