It doesn’t come as any surprise that the telco you love to hate is going to extremes in order to add channels to its line-up.  Comcast has decided that three HD channels can fit in the bandwidth previously allocated for two.  The image quality which used to be perfect HD is now full of static and noise.

The AV Science Forum ran a comparison between some HD channels on Comcast and some HD channels on Verizon FiOS.  Since Verizon isn’t trying to squeeze channels in space they won’t fit, FiOS wins on video signal quality.

Comcast on the other hand is taking video that has already been compressed and compressing it even further producing an image full of missed frames, noise and overall reduced quality.  Still images look just fine but that’s not really the point of HDTV.

The company is not yet doing this with local HD broadcasts and let’s hope it stays that way.  Comcast has added additional compression to the following channels,

Discovery Channel
SciFi
USA

Food
NatGeo
UHD

A&E
HGTV
Starz

Cinemax
HBO
TLC

Animal Planet
Discovery HD Theater
History HD

It’s almost to the point where no HD is better than HD, okay, maybe not that far.  But Comcast, should think about this; the same channels on Comcast HD look far better on Verizon FiOS.  If I were going to switch from Comcast, I’d probably choose Verizon FiOS.

This coupled with the company’s attitude towards bandwidth use and file sharing applications should (but probably won’t) be enough to seal its fate unless something drastic changes.

Related:

Entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 4:48 pm under High Definition Formats.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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