There is a story making the rounds on the interwebitubes bemoaning that “there’s no real regulation over high-definition picture quality at all” in the “lawless lands of broadcast television”. They are over complicating things by suggesting the need for regulatory oversight for something as peripheral to broadcast television as programming payload though. Here’s why…

Unreasonable Assumption: Regulators Could Fix This

It may be that I just don’t love standards bodies or government interference but I really doubt that they are the solution to inconsistent HD picture quality. Just look at the bang up job ATSC did in defining what HDTV would be in the first place.

They couldn’t even settle on whether HD would be interlaced (1080i) or not (720p), and in my humble opinion interlacing really should have been left behind. It has to be by far the worse form of video “compression” still in use today; it is 1940s era tech after all.

ATSC never foresaw a time (read: about 2006) when almost all HDTVs would be natively progressive scan, and that most would have terrible deinterlacing engines. It quickly became obvious in the television marketplace that 1080i was no good so now we have a plethora of “true HD” 1080p displays with literally zero broadcast programming in that format. They of course made the 1080i/720p compromise for bandwidth reasons, but a more modern codec (any MPEG-4 variant or VC-1) can easily handle 1080p given the same bandwidth as an MPEG-2 1080i stream.

Consumers’ Increasing Choices

Here is the real reason regulators shouldn’t be invovled: consumers have choices for their content delivery. The standards for displays are good enough that without switching your HDTV you can get HD programming via over-the-air, DirecTV, Dish, cable, fiber optic (FiOS), or even DSL (U-verse) now. Sure you probably don’t have all six options in one location but you probably have at least three, maybe four. New IP-based download services (Xbox Live, Amazon, iTunes, etc) are creating even more options too.

When I moved to Indiana my cable provider at the time offered terrible HD service. There were very few HD channels, and many shows that I used to watch in HD were broadcast in letterboxed 480p on the “HD” channel! Guess what? I started looking at what DirecTV and Dish were offering. My cable provider added some HD channels and stopped down converting their HD shows before I pulled the trigger though.

The bottom line is, I could have gone elsewhere. DirecTV is already moving to MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) and they can increase bandwidth by adding additional satellites. Consequently their HD seem to be particularly good, especially compared to certain cable companies. To top it off, almost anyone in North America can get DirecTV. I will probably switch as soon as Media Center’s DirecTV support comes out.

If (and that is a huge “if” for most people) people really care about getting better HD picture quality they will switch. Which will put pressure on the low quality providers to improve. We don’t need regulators telling us what does and doesn’t look acceptable. Leave the hard standards for the displays not the content delivery. We really won’t want to be stuck with only MPEG-2 streams a decade or two from now.