SuperBowl Compression by Dish?

[dvrexpander]

Is Dish going to compress the signal tonight for the super bowl??

Super Bowl XLIV Uncompressed Feed: Will You Get The Immaculate Reception? — Reviews and News from Audioholics

This week, Level 3 Communications Inc. announced it’ll provide video of Super Bowl XLIV in what could be the sharpest video presentation ever. Instead of sending the video feed to a production truck to be compressed and then delivered to the network. A 1.5 Gigabit per second feed will travel from Miami to CBS in New York on Level 3’s fiber optic network. The company estimates that overall Super Bowl coverage will encompass no less than 2,800 hours of video that’ll be encoded and transported across its Vyvx Services platform.
"This year, we worked with Level 3 to test uncompressed HD feeds in the delivery of various NFL games and have been impressed with the results," said Bob Mincieli, director of Broadcast Operations at CBS.
It makes you want to go OTA!
Sadly, most HD-video consumers never get to see how good an HDTV broadcast can really look. Satellite and Cable TV subscribers are consistently dogged with high levels of compression. The cable and Satellite companies have compressed and in many cases over-compress video signals so they can add more channels into a finite bandwidth. There are few exceptions to the subscriber TV compression rule, but one of them is Verizon FiOS.

 

[Bobby]

I have watched the local news on my local CBS station, KPIX, on both OTA and Dish. They look nearly exactly the same. The same goes for the national news. I wouldn't worry about it....

 

[gdarwin]

If they are using the fiber for the pregame, I can't tell any difference.

 

[TigerpounceTN]

OTA is not even close to being uncompressed anyway. FiOS can't do anything about the signal they receive from affiliates. We are talking about CBS here. Cable companies, at least the ones who pass the actual OTA bitrate in their QAM muxes, and FiOS will show you the same picture as OTA and satellite will show a slightly different recompressed MPEG4 picture. Their distribution method means jack crap to the average viewer. My local CBS will still look bad. I wish people would stop pretending OTA is uncompressed pristine beauty. It isn't. And yes, Dish will compress the signal. They'd have to take most every other channel down to broadcast this uncompressed and the receivers likely couldn't handle that anyway.

But over-the-air reception is totally free of any re-compression, unlike video from TV distribution services like Cable or Satellite.

Absolute misinformed garbage. That article was written by a moron.

 

[cditty]

OTA is not even close to being uncompressed anyway. FiOS can't do anything about the signal they receive from affiliates. We are talking about CBS here. Cable companies, at least the ones who pass the actual OTA bitrate in their QAM muxes, and FiOS will show you the same picture as OTA and satellite will show a slightly different recompressed MPEG4 picture. Their distribution method means jack crap to the average viewer. My local CBS will still look bad. I wish people would stop pretending OTA is uncompressed pristine beauty. It isn't. And yes, Dish will compress the signal. They'd have to take most every other channel down to broadcast this uncompressed and the receivers likely couldn't handle that anyway.





Absolute misinformed garbage. That article was written by a moron.

+1 And my CBS has a CW subchannel. Even more compression.

 

[goaliebob99]

Nobody other than the network is going to see that feed! The local stations will take that 1.5 gig feed and compress it down to 19.5 megs if your lucky! I think its a waste if they cant offer it to nobody other themselves.

 

[KAB]

Is Dish going to compress the signal tonight for the super bowl??

Of course they are. Just like any other night. A job for OTA if in doubt.

 

[TigerpounceTN]

Nobody other than the network is going to see that feed! The local stations will take that 1.5 gig feed and compress it down to 19.5 megs if your lucky! I think its a waste if they cant offer it to nobody other themselves.

I agree. I also wish I could be that lucky with my CBS station. People who read this article and try to watch OTA will be sorely disappointed that it looks almost exactly the same as on their current provider. I can see how one less generation of compression can help overall, but it won't make too much difference after it is butchered by the CBS affiliates.

 

[digiblur]

Really no point. The feed is going to get compressed in New York and sent out over the Cband CBS backhaul to the stations. Probably somewhere in the 30 megabit range. Then it is going to muxed into the stations encoder and sent out OTA and fiber to the local video companies (cable, fios, etc).

So basically what was said above... the feed will look nice in New York's studio where it is received and that's it.

 

[DishSubLA]

I have to report that I saw part of the SuperBowl today viewing from my OTA antenna directly into my HDTV on KCBS-digital (HD) Ch. 2, Los Angeles, and I was appalled to see macro-blocking and horrid picture break-up in fast camera motion. Usually, KCBS is among the best OTA HD PQ's around here, and I am unaware of KCBS operating any sub-channels (unlike KNBC and KABC who do run sub-channels) that could cause such problems (KABC is running TWO HD channels: KABC 7.1 ABC network and local programming and 7.2 Live Well HD, along with 7.3 lousy news and weather which is really Accuweather's video service).

In short, surprisingly bad PQ at times viewed using OTA directly into HDTV. But this is really not that uncommon here. As I have said in other posts, often the Dish Los Angeles HD LIL is superior to the OTA direct to HDTV. True, the mole on the actor's face is just a teeny-bit less detailed on Dish HD LIL, but it is a more aesthetic and enjoyable PQ. Dish Los Angeles HD LIL is awfully close to direct OTA to HDTV and really superior, although I know that this is not the case in a number of other DMA's. It is sad that Dish seems to care less about smaller cities' HD LIL.

However, the poor PQ may have occurred at or from its journey from Miami to New York on the land lines. Frankly an up-link truck or high quality fiber to the nearest uplink point (a broadcast center or local station) is going to be more reliable with much more contro and less likely hood of problems as it journeys from switching center to switching center. Compressed video is not necessarily a bad thing. Our vaunted Blu-ray is compressed video. There are always other factors involved that can affect PQ far more than compression.

It is ironic that when satellite came along for broadcasters, besides its lower cost than using telco lines running across the country for back hauls and national feeds, one of its many benefits was its relative simplicity requiring less links in the what was complicated chain. While far more reliable today, sending high quality video hundreds or thousands of miles on land lines--fiber or not--has its risks, and even Dish suffers from it from time to time as we have lost LA HD and SD LIL's as a group (SD's up-linked on different transponders and different satellites) on a number of occasions that, to my modest investigation, are most likely problems with the fiber land line journey to the up-link.

 

[DishSubLA]

I have watched the local news on my local CBS station, KPIX, on both OTA and Dish. They look nearly exactly the same. The same goes for the national news. I wouldn't worry about it....

I think it is because you are in a very big metro area that could easily overwhelm Dish's CSR lines with complainants as we here in Los Angeles also have an outstanding HD LIL that is nearly identical to OTA direct to TV, but this is not the case for many forum members in smaller cities.

 

[DishSubLA]

OTA is not even close to being uncompressed anyway. FiOS can't do anything about the signal they receive from affiliates. We are talking about CBS here. Cable companies, at least the ones who pass the actual OTA bitrate in their QAM muxes, and FiOS will show you the same picture as OTA and satellite will show a slightly different recompressed MPEG4 picture. Their distribution method means jack crap to the average viewer. My local CBS will still look bad. I wish people would stop pretending OTA is uncompressed pristine beauty. It isn't. And yes, Dish will compress the signal. They'd have to take most every other channel down to broadcast this uncompressed and the receivers likely couldn't handle that anyway.





Absolute misinformed garbage. That article was written by a moron.

Agreed, especially with the line directly above.

 

[am7crew]

looks great for me here out of Atlanta.

 

[rdinkel]

looks great for me here out of Atlanta.

+1 Colorado Springs DMA

 

[avp]

I am in NY and the game looked great OTA. When I compared it to dish the difference was amazing. Here WCBS runs no sub-channels.

When looking at a shot with the stands in the background you could see all the facial features and
expressions of the people. You could read clearly the lettering on shirts and hats. On dish it looked like a bad video game with almost a faceless crowd and blobs for the lettering on clothing. I did this with moving and still content.
I compare dish to ota all the time and this event had the biggest difference.
When watching the news after the game there was still a difference but not as much as during the game.

It was nice to see what HDTV should really look like all the time.

The other thing that stood out was the DD 5.1 sound quality. Ota was of greater quality. Is dish still downsampling to 44khz?
This approached Blu-ray quality.

With the rumor that Fios is going to use Cisco to make their next DVR it might be time to switch.

 

[KAB]

With the rumor that Fios is going to use Cisco to make their next DVR it might be time to switch.

You better hope they're not as bad as the ones they make for Uverse.

 

[riffjim4069]

You better hope they're not as bad as the ones they make for Uverse.

I agree...Verizon needs to ink a deal with EchoStar for their T2200S model DVR.

But I don't see that happening...

 

[bobvick]

+1 And my CBS has a CW subchannel. Even more compression.

That sounds like the CBS affiliate here in the Birmingham market, it has 2 subchannels, one called "Untamed Sports" and the other is a local weather channel. WIAT looks real good compared to the affiliate out of Columbus, MS though, it has 2 sub channels as well but the main feed looks much more compressed than WIAT Birmingham for some reason.

 

[Mike_H]

Hmm.. I guess I found the Dish signal for my affiliate (WCCO channel 4 in Mpls/St. Paul) to be almost equivalent to the OTA signal I was picking up. I was attributing the lack of detail in some areas, i.e. the grass, on the equipment being used for the broadcast. Since this was run through affiliates, and not on a single channel somewhere on dish, my guess would be that the quality that people saw will vary considerably, depending on how well dish is doing at sending that local channel to you. I thought they did just fine on mine.