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I have such a hard time watching anything in SD - I cringe at the sight of Survivor and The Daily Show.

You know, the funny thing is, SD didn't used to look that bad.

Once upon a time, SD shows came over analog cable TV or over the air, or over analog satellite. And the picture quality was pretty decent. Even when DirecTV first started broadcasting, the picture quality was great. Very sharp and crisp.

Then we went to digital cable and digital satellite, and people like Hughes discovered that you could cram a billion more channels onto the same carrier simply by overcompressing the existing channels. Now, every SD channel looks like shit. Blurry and pixellated from overcompression.

Even local TV stations who broadcast over-the-air shows are now getting those shows from their network parents via a compressed link of some kind, so their source material is visibly data-compressed.

This sucks. Of course, at first, no one noticed because everyone was watching this stuff on tiny little TV sets. Now that we're all starting to buy big screen HDTVs, we're starting to notice how much it sucks.

I wish that people would have had HDTV and big-screen television sets *BEFORE* the invention of digital sattelite. That way, when DirecTV got crappy looking, more people would have noticed and complained.

I wonder if there will be a backlash, or if we'll just eventually go all-HD for everything and then DirecTV can slowly make THAT look crappy.
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Tony Fabris