Statement in Today's Dispatch on HD OTA Quality

[esb100]

With the big game this weekend, Molly Willow, who I like as a TV columnist, wrote today how Time Warner cable customers are still not getting ABC 6 and Fox 28 in HD. She states in the column that "If you have a tuner for your HD set, you just need an antenna to pick up the signal, although it might not be as high-quality as the cable delivery."

Any thoughts here to this statement? I imagine there will be.

[Dbailey]

I always thought that a direct OTA signal is the BEST digital signal you can receive. I thought cable and sat's compress their signal and running over long cable line sometimes degrades the signal. I am not expert but that is what i assumed. I have DirecTV and the OTA signal is better. It is not night and day but it is better...

[Scott]

DirecTV positively compresses their local HD signals. Insight and Wow have a fiber feed from the source, so I do not believe any compression is involoved. OTA should be of the same quality as the feeds coming from Insight/Wow.

[rossl]

"If you have a tuner for your HD set, you just need an antenna to pick up the signal, although it might not be as high-quality as the cable delivery."

I get channel 6 OTA at a stronger level than those that come over the cable. It is high-quality. WTTE is a different situation altogether and is one of the reasons I am switching to WOW cable. WTTE drops out 2 or 3 times a minute and is not what I would describe as high-quality.

I did notice last weekend during the Steelers game on Sunday that I didn't get a single dropout during the game.... but they started up again a few minutes into the post-game show. That tells me they are playing games with their power level.

[festivus]

I think that the reporter is incorrect. She must be thinking of the way ota analog signals are received, not digital. Taking compression (sat and cable) out of the equation, a locked-on ota digital signal should be as good if not better than cable. Personally, when I got some HD locals with TWC, I didn't notice any difference with the HD stuff. Now with dish, wsyx sd via sat vs ota wsyx sd there is a big diff. The OTA signal is much better than satellite. I'm assuming it's due to compression.

[Ronald Long]

I think that the reporter is incorrect. She must be thinking of the way ota analog signals are received, not digital. Taking compression (sat and cable) out of the equation, a locked-on ota digital signal should be as good if not better than cable. Personally, when I got some HD locals with TWC, I didn't notice any difference with the HD stuff. Now with dish, wsyx sd via sat vs ota wsyx sd there is a big diff. The OTA signal is much better than satellite. I'm assuming it's due to compression.
I wrote Ms Willow as follows:
You wrote:

(If you have a tuner for your HD set, you just need an antenna to pick up the signal, although it might not be as high-quality as the cable delivery.)

This is incorrect. With analog OTA (over the air with an antenna) TV we have been used to differing levels of quality, for example putting up with snow from a weak signal and ghosts which degrade the picture. However with OTA HD TV you either receive a perfect picture (no ghosts etc.) or no picture at all if the signal is too weak or if there are multiple strong signals from building reflections as is sometimes the case in metropolitan areas.

Also the OTA picture may be superior to that delivered by cable. This is because the providers are permitted to use different levels of compression to save bandwidth. Therefore in some cases a cable company may slightly degrade the signal that they receive from the local station by using additional compression. In fairness we should also mention that local broadcasters, by making use of multi-casting, broadcast a HD signal that is less than the maximum possible. For example WCMH-DT transmits a second signal called Wx-Plus and WSYX-DT has one called My Tube. WOSU transmits two signals in addition to the main HD programming stream.
Ronald Long.

[Timcredible]

i think what she's referring to is the bitrate - cable provides the full bitrate for each digital channel and subchannel, whereas ota has a set amount of bandwidth, so subchannels rob bandwidth from the 'main' channel. so, she's correct.... if the cable company doesn't compress the signal. and directv is a worthless rebroadcast, the way they compress everything.

[nakedeye]

To my knowledge only WCMH is better via TWC than OTA. Not shure about Insight or WOW. WCMH has a fiber fun to TWC at full bit rate while it squeezes out 2mbps out of the OTA.

WSYX I have no idea if insight or wow gets a fiber feed. Unlikely though as i know insight used to pick it up ota than retrans.

WTTE is the same via fiber or ota. fox lowers the national bit rate for one sub.

WBNS "should" be the same unless they start doing that 10.2 crap again.

WOSU, again no idea, but i belive cable is the same crap as ota.