Quality Broadcasting

The first is the image quality trade-off that has been made in the adoption of digital transmission and HD. What we were promised was that the digital transmission would give us better quality pictures. In fact it has given us much worse quality and HD has made that all the more apparent. Watching the football at a friend’s house on his new HD set I was completely distracted by the intrusive compression artefacts. As the camera panned across the pitch following the ball, the grass was a blur, which seemed quite natural and could have been caused by the rapid pan. As the camera stopped moving to focus on the goalmouth, the grass would stay blurred for a moment and then, WHAM! it clicked into focus as compression algorithms realised that the static image could be transmitted in greater detail. In the analogue days the director would have been yelling at the cameramen, but now it is ‘digital’ we all shrug and accept it.

The second irritation is the BBC’s ‘now and next’. At the end of each show, the credits are squeezed (they are contractually obliged to transmit them, even if you have trouble reading them) into a fraction of the screen area whilst they present a list of the next programmes to be broadcast. I don’t have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is that every time they start the squeeze sequence there is a noticeable jump in the image. The first time it happened, I just thought the technical staff had fallen asleep. But now it happens every time on every programme. What is probably going on is that they switch in a new bit of kit to do the squeeze, and it takes longer for the media to travel through it, so we miss a few frames and the credits jump. There was a time when everyone involved in transmission looked critically at everything broadcast and would jump on such issues. I was once almost fired in the middle of the Channel 4 News newsroom by an apoplectic editor, Richard Tait, for letting my piece of kit misbehave and show a blank green screen. Now, nobody seems to care.

But my final annoyance is that our transmission standards have slipped so badly. Our local transmitter suffered a fire in May and we lost a bunch of channels including ITV. When they replaced the transmitter, they upgraded it in some way, some very clever way, which now means lots of folks in Oxfordshire have not been able to receive some or all ITV channels for over 6 months. So however good Downton Abbey (filmed partly in Oxfordshire) or any of ITV’s other quality output was, we missed it. And, no, please don’t tell me to retune, I’ve done that and yes we had a great signal before the fire. Still, I suppose it stops me getting annoyed at the compression artefacts of the digital image.

Have a great Christmas whether you plan a ‘Strictly’ one or not.