compress this !
I just had a long discussion on this subject with an ex-TV engineer from Los Angeles.
He has moved away from there, but still gets LA on sat, plus gets the networks delivered by a local station.
He says LA networks are uplinked via network satellites running 8-10 megabits per second, for delivery to out of town network stations.
So, they'll have about the same satellite lag time delay Dish has. *
He was comparing that to his Dish reception, and claimed Dish was much worse.
From my study, I'd say networks are running around 2 to 2.3 mega bits per second on Dish.
The picture problems he describes, I really haven't seen.
Fade all picture to black (or maybe cut to black) tears up Dish, he says.
I edit those shows sometimes, and I sure don't see it.
I won't say he's wrong, but as an ex-tv engineer, who's worked with hi-def, I wonder how hypercritical he might be?
* He was counting maybe three seconds lag between his local station over the air, and Dish.
That, he said, was a sign that Dish probably had good encoders trying to do the right thing, making mpeg.
And the fact that they don't have good stuff coming out, was just due to crowding too much data into the transponder.
(in other words, it didn't all get through)
We surmised that maybe some little city with 100k people might get even worse compression of their locals than LA or NY, but we don't have the data to back that up.