With HD imminently becoming more accessible and common in the UK, I read this forum post with despair. I looks like Comcast have just dropped the bitrates on all their national HD channels, severely reducing picture quality.
The issue of available bandwidth on cable and especially Freeview has been holding HD back in the UK. In fact, Freeview is pretty much full and adding any more channels, let alone HD ones, is going to mean removing or severely reducing the quality of some others. The biggest issue is that all current Freeview receivers, including those built in to most new TVs, are only capable of decoding MPEG2. For HD, ideally you want t move to MPEG4/H.264 because that would allow HD channels to be broadcast at only slightly higher bitrates than SD channels in MPEG2. Sky has proposed this as a subscription HD option, but it is unlikely to be accepted because Ofcom wants free-to-air HD channels, preferably without requiring everyone to buy new equipment.
Perhaps Comcast’s move is a sign of things to come. Unfortunately a lot of media companies seem to be of the opinion that their customers should eat their shit and like it, but I think if I were a Comcast customer I’d be switching, probably to fibre. Don’t get me started on fibre in the UK…