I compared the bitrate in VLC of a recording of DW-English done on C-Band about a year ago with one done just now on Ku, and it's the same, around 6Mbps. Not great but not terrible either. But I agree the picture quality is not great. My take is that DW English is there mostly to feed DTH services, cable systems and the occasional OTA subchannel, which will all compress it even more. Now, why would they use such a wide transponder for just that channel, I'm hoping it means they will add other services...
That's what I am hoping, too. I did notice that DW Espanol HD (FTA) and DW Deutsch plus HD (scrambled) were just added to 30W Ku (12094 H 29997) so they seem to be expanding into North America more.
I suspect this is in prevision of a switch away from C-Band (those are currently on 55W). It would be a shame if we were to lose DW Deutsch +, the only channel we get in German
You might be correct, as the only loss switching to 30w would be the European part of the 55W C-band beam, as 30W pretty much covers the same North/South American beam (except for a part of Brazil). So might be expanding to Ku, but contracting on C-band. Hopefully not.
