I have to say I really enjoy that Rainier site though. The design out of the 90's is fascinating. The weird marketing buzz words Glen uses, the strange capitalization. The endless blog posts about how "Were" (Glen doesn't know what apostrophes are apparently) the future of C-Band. His little graphics and the way he phrases things is strangely entertaining.
Pure1080. LOL.
These are sad times we are living in when a 7 Mbps H.264 channel is considered "ultra high bandwidth HD". I mean, as nice as the C-band feeds are, most of them are still really overcompressed and the material is still losing a lot of detail that could be retained with higher bitrates (20+ Mbps). Most of the networks settle for something in the 3-9 Mbps range. The cable companies and pizza pan satellite companies have just lowered the bar so much that these 3-9 Mbps uplinks look impressive when compared to the re-encoded junk that the pizzas and the cables dish out.
They still pale in comparison to the quality offered by a Blu-ray or even Amazon and Netflix's 1080p streams, and especially Amazon and Netflix's 4K streams. Amazon has cleaner sources that they produce their encodes from and uses much better encoding settings than the realtime H.264 encoders these networks use at their uplinks so even at similar bitrates, material on their Prime Video service looks a lot better than the TV broadcast on the C-band network feed.
The only web sources that linear channels are still better quality than are direct network web sources. A&E Networks, for example distributes all their programs via the web on their websites/apps using terrible 720p H.264 @ 3 Mbps. But if you buy their content on Amazon's PrimeVideo service, it will look better than the A&E network feeds on C-band, because Amazon's version will be available at 1080p with good bitrates. But of course, not everything is available on Blu-ray, or even available to stream on Amazon or Netflix, so for that material that still has no Blu-ray and lacks a good web distribution source, that is when C-band is a real gem. Live PD for example, A&E doesn't put up on Amazon so the only way to watch it is that terrible 720p version from A&E's website or on A&E's 1080i channel. And the 1080i channel clearly wins in this scenario.
I overall agree with the premise that what DirecTV, Dish, the cable cos and the telcos repackage and sell is crap, but claiming that the C-band uplinks of these channels have better than Blu-ray quality, them's fightin' words. That is just a bold faced lie.
The only cases where that claim may sometimes be true is with a high bitrate backhaul wildfeed but he is not referring to backhaul feeds.
Anyways, even though I know y'all hate him, I do kind of hope Glen is successful in his business, as much of a longshot as C-band may be. It would be nice if it was actually possible to just buy a subscription to most of these networks' master uplinks directly instead of having to buy some re-encoded piece of crap version of those channels from the cable company or DirecTV/Dish's offerings, and have to deal with their picking what channels you can get instead of you being able to pick the channels you want. Customers being able to get programming directly from the network of their choosing without obnoxious middlemen like DirecTV/Dish is going to be the future, but it is going to be through the Internet and not through satellites.
