Verizon and their “Uncompressed HDTV” Ads… Yeesh

Verizon has started an ad campaign stating that they have “Pure Uncompressed High Definition” to basically kick Comcast around some more.

In one of the spots, a fictional cable customer excitedly plugs a coaxial cable into the back of a flat-panel HDTV set, saying, “This is going to look amazing!”—only to watch the TV spit the cable out. The hapless customer repeatedly tries to reconnect the cable, without success.

That’s the premise of one of their commercials. Afterwards, the “Pure Uncompressed High Definition” logo comes up, only to have techies snicker at them. Even in this day of high speeds, we still need compression on all HD content, otherwise, according to MultiChannel, just one 1080i (Interlaced, not even progressive) stream would take up 1.5 Gigabits per second. That’s almost two-thirds of the bandwidth Verizon’s new fiber system.

“It’s true that content owners compress their video before sending it to video service providers,” she said in an e-mailed statement. “But we forward the signal to our customers the way that we receive it.”

So couldn’t this techincally be false advertisement? Because sure, it’s not compressed from Verizon, but it’s not pure either because the broadcasters compress it. Either way, it’s still an iffy campaign to be running.

Via [MultiChannel]