Recent degradation in Sky signal quality - coincidence?

gldkg

Sky have deliberately decreased the picture quality of some of their channels (most noticably Sky Sports 1 and Sky One) to coincide with their promotion of HD.

Discuss.

amcluesent

Even ITV1 seems to be pixelating badly with me. I shan't be upgrading to HD though - crash and burn Sky marketing!!

gldkg

No-one else has any feelings about this? Personally I'm outraged.

996ducati

Sounds like the old story when Amstrad put CD players on their midi hi-fi & the engineer said "it sounds the same as the tape player" to which he was instructed to make the tape player sound "worse!".(Allegedly!)

Perhaps HD TV needs some help to be worth the premium?

sunflower_2

am soooo pleased someone else has noticed this

what annoys me more is how they have reduced the sound quality on the movie channels
its so obvious

and have u seen the price of the sky HD?!?!?!? :eek:

amcluesent

>Sounds like the old story when Amstrad <

LOL. Good old Amstrad. A mate of mine at Uni bought one of their 'hi-fi' systems, being attracted by the 'accoustic lens' tweeters on the loudspeaker boxes. Turned out this was just a piece of stuck on plastic, there was no actual tweeter behind it!

gldkg

996ducati wrote:

Sounds like the old story when Amstrad put CD players on their midi hi-fi & the engineer said "it sounds the same as the tape player" to which he was instructed to make the tape player sound "worse!".(Allegedly!)

Perhaps HD TV needs some help to be worth the premium?

Yep, that's what I reckon it is. Surely what they're doing is unethical practice? I don't think many people have realised this is happening... maybe if we got enough support on this thread we could put some pressure on Sky to explain themselves?

sunflower_2

gldkg wrote:

Yep, that's what I reckon it is. Surely what they're doing is unethical practice? I don't think many people have realised this is happening... maybe if we got enough support on this thread we could put some pressure on Sky to explain themselves?

am defo up for a full-on-sky-war !!!

i dont think they would take one person seriously, but with a few they will have to give an answer to their sneaky behaviour

facade

What do you mean recent?
I've always found the pictures on digital far far poorer quality than on analogue which is why I still watch analogue when I can. (We have cable and free view, they are both rubbish)

Trouble is most people are either blind, or they don't care. What chance have you got of a decent TV picture when someone is prepared to watch DVDs on a 4" screen and claim they have a "good" picture. People want TV on a mobile phone screen for goodness' sake!

They (all 3 digital providers) always reduce the bitrate to the lowest they can get away with. You can't tell if the little lego men are kicking the square ball on carpet tiles or a pan scourer most days.

Looks like I will have to get HDTV in 2011 to get the same quality as i used to get 20 years ago.

shown73

Ditto for digital radio, in my humble opinion. I used to get superb sound and reception even in the 60's/70's, and from quite modestly priced radios. That's not just misty eyed nostalgia, it's fact.