Here's my letter:
Hello,
I'm a recent new customer with the HD package including HBO and Showtime HD. I'm dissatisfied with the picture quality and see terrible digital artifacting on most if not all HD programs. ESPN-HD seems the least affected but is still sub-par for what HDTV should look like. I'm able to compare your signal to off-the-air digital signals which are much better in quality.
The bitrates you are allowing for many of the HD channels are simply not adequate. This is fairly simple to calculate based on recording from an HD-Tivo. See http://www.widemovies.com/dfwbitrate.html
This situation is well know on www.avsforum.com (the largest and most well known internet site for HDTV). I'm hoping you will correct this soon as I (and many others I'm sure) will have to discontinue your service and switch to Cable or DishNetwork if it does not improve.
Your presently unsatisfied customer,
Charles Catron
D*'s response:
Dear Mr. Catron,
Thank you for asking us about the picture quality on your DIRECTV System. In accordance with our company policy, we cannot give out the specifics of the resolution of our broadcast signal. This is partly because we are always fine-tuning our quality. The goal of our engineers is to design the very best transmission operation that will bring you extraordinary video, audio, and data along with the programming.
Though our engineers have very high standards, I'm sure you understand that our success as a business depends in part on carrying a wide selection of programming. Therefore, due to limitations in satellite space capacity we must balance our desire to provide outstanding signal quality with the demand for a wide selection of channels. We are proud of the job we do at delivering both.
To be able to keep enhancing our signal quality AND to bring our customers lots of choices, we are always working on upgrades to our broadcast infrastructure that let us transmit our programming more efficiently. In other words, we can add more channels without sacrificing picture quality, and we can improve picture quality without having to drop any channels.
We appreciate your patience as we adjust and fine tune our systems. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. I have also forwarded your concern to DIRECTV management.
Sincerely,
Bonamei
DIRECTV Customer Service
Hello,
I'm a recent new customer with the HD package including HBO and Showtime HD. I'm dissatisfied with the picture quality and see terrible digital artifacting on most if not all HD programs. ESPN-HD seems the least affected but is still sub-par for what HDTV should look like. I'm able to compare your signal to off-the-air digital signals which are much better in quality.
The bitrates you are allowing for many of the HD channels are simply not adequate. This is fairly simple to calculate based on recording from an HD-Tivo. See http://www.widemovies.com/dfwbitrate.html
This situation is well know on www.avsforum.com (the largest and most well known internet site for HDTV). I'm hoping you will correct this soon as I (and many others I'm sure) will have to discontinue your service and switch to Cable or DishNetwork if it does not improve.
Your presently unsatisfied customer,
Charles Catron
D*'s response:
Dear Mr. Catron,
Thank you for asking us about the picture quality on your DIRECTV System. In accordance with our company policy, we cannot give out the specifics of the resolution of our broadcast signal. This is partly because we are always fine-tuning our quality. The goal of our engineers is to design the very best transmission operation that will bring you extraordinary video, audio, and data along with the programming.
Though our engineers have very high standards, I'm sure you understand that our success as a business depends in part on carrying a wide selection of programming. Therefore, due to limitations in satellite space capacity we must balance our desire to provide outstanding signal quality with the demand for a wide selection of channels. We are proud of the job we do at delivering both.
To be able to keep enhancing our signal quality AND to bring our customers lots of choices, we are always working on upgrades to our broadcast infrastructure that let us transmit our programming more efficiently. In other words, we can add more channels without sacrificing picture quality, and we can improve picture quality without having to drop any channels.
We appreciate your patience as we adjust and fine tune our systems. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. I have also forwarded your concern to DIRECTV management.
Sincerely,
Bonamei
DIRECTV Customer Service
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