It's no secret that the 'HD' picture quality on U-verse and various Cable and Dish carriers etc. is not truly high definition from the perspective that most consumers expect it to be. The marketing machines have watered down the term 'HD' to make you believe you are getting a better quality picture than you actually are. Is it better quality than the old standard definition picture? Sure. Is it better quality than a 480i DVD as high definition was originally marketed? This is debatable, depending on the carrier. But, I think the answer, in most cases, is not really.
The only criteria they are using to designate the content as 'HD' is if the resolution meets the minimum 720p. Forget the fact that the content itself has been so compressed and frame rate reduced to fit within a 5-6Mbps bandwidth budget or less. A 480i MPEG-2 DVD stream will typically use 5-8Mbps of bandwidth. The carriers are delivering anywhere from 1.5 - 5Mbps of 720p H.264 video. Sure H.264 may be a little bit better codec than MPEG-2 but it isn't that much better.
Anyway, I found this article from 2008 that covered this issue pretty well and thought it was worth sharing. I do not intend for this to be a rant thread. I just thought this was interesting info on the state of video quality marketing and the term 'HD'.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ou/dont-believe-the-low-bit-rate-hd-lie/959
The point is that we've all been duped into believing that the providers are giving us something better than they are. Some are worse than others. If they want to minimally compete with the quality of OTA HD, they will need to be able to deliver a 10Mbps 720p 30fps stream. I believe that figure jumps to around 17.5Mbps for 1080i at 30fps.
I won't hold my breath with AT&T. But, I'm looking forward to future announcements on HD picture quality improvement, as this next wave of "Gigapower" or Project VIP upgrades start to take shape and more customers have access to bandwidth profiles that would permit this level of streaming bitrates.
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Scott, CCIE #14618 Routing & Switching
http://rolande.wordpress.com/
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