Rogers Degrading HD Quality Due to QAM

In another blow to the cable industry, primarily Canadian cable, Rogers Communications is going to be compressing HD video streams, thus degrading the quality of your HD programming. Here’s the list of channels affected:

• HD PBS Buffalo
• HD WGN
• HD The Score
• HD Showcase
• HD National Geographic
• HD Mpix
• HD Discovery
• HD MORE
• HD TMN
• HD NBC Seattle
• HD SUN
• HD RAP
• HDA&E
• HDCNN
• HDNET

The reason why Rogers is compressing is ultimately due to capacity. Even with QAM and being able to put more channels in the same amount of space, Rogers is apparently unable to reserve enough bandwidth for other purposes. Digitalhome.ca brought up an interesting fact. Featured in this Gizmodo article (for the HD faint of heart, reader discretion is advised), it clearly shows the effects of compression, and they are not pretty at all.

Sadly, I only see this kind of thing going on as the demand for HD channels keep getting higher, yet the providers aren’t willing to upgrade their networks to support the additional load. Some users in the Broadband Reports forums commented that MPEG-4 compression (same quality, lower file sizes) could solve this, but it’s once again up to the provider to upgrade users set-top boxes to support MPEG-4 compression, something that would cost quite a bit to do.

Via [BroadbandReports]

Read [Digital Home Canada]