Forgive me, I'm going to rearrange your message a little bit to bring similar thoughts together.
Nah, not killing. I wouldn't have taken this job if I was worried about the future of Luken Communications.
Luken requires its affiliates to utilize a 3.8 meter dish to receive its C-band feeds. The Ku feed is supposed to be a backup but I can name three affiliates, off the top of my head, that are using it as their only source.
One service Luken offers is the ability to provide a feed direct to the affiliate with local spots included. Fewer and fewer stations need the service as master control equipment gets upgraded with the ability to handle multiple streams, though we are still finding stations that do not have such equipment and so our service interests them. As a result, you'll observe that some of the feeds are getting moved around and consolidated. And you're right, it's not inexpensive. To help with that expense, DVB-S2 and MPEG-4 and other things are designed to make optimal use of the bandwidth available in the transponder given the expense involved, but as you've observed, they make reception more challenging for viewers and affiliates. When you do the numbers though, to spend the money on larger dishes or slightly more expensive receivers quickly pays for itself versus the cost of additional transponder(s).
- Trip
Ah.. Well bummer for me.. I only have a 10' dish..
Usually, reception is rarely a problem for me anymore since I got the 10' dish put up. Every once in a while some things drop off when the weather gets nasty or if strong winds are buffeting the dish about but it's pretty rare and I can live with it.
What I really meant by my statement that Luken needs to clean the signal up is that the video is extremely compressed and looks really bad on an HD set. All my sets are now 1080p flat screens and they just amplify the video errors.
I may not be the brightest bulb on the string but I'm an amateur photographer and I know about and understand image quality and compression. I have a Canon EOS 5D mark II and with lenses and accessories it's worth the price of a nice car. It also takes 1080p video that is BETTER quality than a $25,000
Red One HD camera can do... I'm also a tetrachromat which means I can see colors that most people can not. So I'm ultra attentive to image quality. That's why I bought the best DSLR you can get. Anyway..
You can take a still image or a video (which is essentially a string of still images) and you can do several things with it.
1. You can send it to someone with near zero compression (lossless) and the image / video will be BIG but retains it's original quality.
2. You can send it with SOME compression (lossy) at a reasonable quality of say 80% to 75% and still have a fairly decent image and a much smaller file size.
3. You can send it compressed all to dickens at say a really nasty, black hearted compression rate that gives you like 20% of the original quality that looks HORRIBLE but gives you a very, very small file size that transmits quickly and cheaply.
#3 is what Luken is doing. I don't have any way to definitively state that the quality is X or the compression ratio they use is X but it's pretty bad.
I do have a 7" LCD TV that uses the yellow video cables (old school) and the Luken channels look pretty decent on the tiny screen.
But on a big screen, the quality is not there, the data has been compressed away and the tuner has to make up for the lost image data by playing blotchy LEGO games with the picture.
In the early days, the video quality of RTV was really nice when it was 720x480.. Now it's 352x480 (on 83w) which is essentially VHS quality. On 87w it's 720x480 but it's so heavily compressed that it looks no better than the 320x480. I suspect that it's just the 352x480 video being upscaled like some DVD players do these days. I can't prove that of course but it's what I suspect. And the 480, is really only 240 lines on an old school TV.
I don't know how things work on a satellite or at the station where they make it all happen but I very much understand image quality and the disaster of image compression. People like my Dad, would never notice this because he simply isn't aware of these things or attuned to them. Most people aren't. Most people, you could give a sheet of graph paper and crayons to a drunken chimp and have him make a Mutoscope flipbook video and most people would be thrilled with the quality.
For goodness sakes, it's 2012.. I just can't understand why someone would still be transmitting a 1971 VHS quality signal anymore.
All I can say is thank goodness they forced the old TV standards to die as far as OTA television goes. Things are getting better as the dinosaurs die off.
We'll still be watching stuff with black bars on the sides for a few hundred years, at least until future generations bury our oldies for the last time.
But thankfully new content is being made to fit wide screens now. But it would be nice if broadcasters could have mercy upon our eyes and back off on the heavy handed compression, it really looks bloody horrible..
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