Without Distributor-led Changes on Compression, 4K Just Doesn't Matter
tl;dr Video signals seen by most content consumers are grossly compressed and therefore obscures content intended by their creators that are never delivered to their intended audiences. I call for content distributor transparency in the manner and degree of their compression technology, and a means by which customers can elect to get the maximum viewing experience possible. And advertisers should be noisily clmmering for the same for their paid ads, which are no less affected, and in many cases, are delivered under worse conditions.
I'll admit it. I was a tech nerd growing up. I was the president of my high school video club. This is no embarrassment. This disclosure to you, dear Reader, is in the service of conveying that I'm sitting on more than 30 years of first-hand nerdery about how the technology of TV, and behind TV, works.
From the vantage of 2022 it's easy to disparage the stone age of NTSC analog-signal television of the late-20th Century. But missing in that conversation is just how good a 525i analog signal could be. And that was much, much better than the downsampled digital versions of 20th-Century content readily seen today. Put another way, TV in the second half of the 20th Century was not cause for mass complaint of poor image quality.
I say that because, in the stone age depicted as over-the-air, analog color TV, signal compression artifacts weren't a thing. Sure, there might be a degree of degradation due to atmospheric conditions (i.e., a bit of static noise in the signal), but on the whole, if your set was getting a strong signal--and in analog that is a relative term, to be sure--you could have a very fine, no compromises viewing experience, indeed.
Fast forward to digitally broadcast TV, and with it, the proliferation of video compression techniques designed to squeeze more channels down limited pipe. This is where the story gets literally, and not metaphorically, fuzzy.
At the dawn of digital transmissions in the early 2000s, a child in my house watched a lot of Dora the Explorer. Too much, probably. It was also around that time that a relative of mine worked at the Viacom satellite uplink facility outside of New York City, where the signal for dozens of networks was delivered to the bird (i.e., satellite) in the sky.
For every one of those dozens of Viacom channels, there was a console with a human operator looking at a monitor to make sure the feed was being delivered to the satellite equipment cleanly. Rows and rows of these workstations--think a dimly-lit version of NASA's Houston Mission Control.
Walking up and down the aisles of consoles tuned to different networks, what caught my eye was Dora. I did a double take because what I saw on the monitor tuned to Nick Jr. changed my impression of mass transmitted video forever. What I was seeing in that control center was the pre-compressed signal. At 525i, it was glorious. A very sharp picture with eye-popping color. Not at all like the murky, fuzzy experience of that same content in my home living room, delivered courtesy of compression by half-a-dozen systems between that Viacom network center and my in-home cable box.
It got me thinking about the various video compression experiments at that time pitted in a kind of technology survival of the fittest: Outwit, Outlast, Outplay.
Fast forward 20 years to the current state of terrestrial cable TV, satellite TV, and over-the-top (OTT) streaming, the results have been mixed: the sheer volume of content available today thanks to compression is unprecedented. At the same time, the picture quality--and more importantly to many--the fidelity of the original signal to what makes it to your smart TV, PC or other viewing device has been, underwhelming at best, and frequently disappointing.
A careful observer will notice signal dropouts, compression artifacts and some lack of definition that collectively make the signal fuzzy and blocky all at once. Today when I watch streaming 4K video on my LG Smart TV, the show content looks glorious, but the first 5 or 10 seconds of each commercial is unwatchable. After a moment, the high compression signal gives way to a higher bandwidth, lower compression signal that looks like the HD content the advertiser expected. But still surely less awesome than the original file delivered to the broadcaster.
(As an aside, I wonder how little telemetry from these partially degraded ads are ever delivered back to the paying advertisers. I would suspect that there would be a lot more make-good ads being delivered by OTT broadcasters if paying advertisers had full visibility into what little of the first few seconds of their ads many customers can see.)
While my TV of choice at home is labeled as 4K, unless I directly plug in a 4K camera to an input jack on the back of the display, I'm not seeing the richness and fidelity intended by the originating content producer. This is why the 4K image a shopper sees on the showroom floor is oozing of contrast and quality and nothing at home seems to compare. If the retailer has an in-store demo display unit set-up to spec, the in-store customer is seeing as close to an uncompressed, high dynamic range, ultra high definition signal, at max refresh rate and every bit of the Energy Star-certified auto-dimming energy saving features turned off. Importantly, that shopper may notice you're definitely not watching live TV from a cable or satellite provider--it's an on-site source running an uncompressed (or very lightly compressed) signal on a demo loop designed to tweak the available color gamut to its max.
If you haven't seen an uncompressed 4K signal live on a soundstage, inside a news studio, or in creating your own raw content with all quality metrics cranked to 11, it's hard to describe what you've been missing. Even a casual observer will notice details easily discerned in an uncompressed 4K video signal that don't stand a chance at making it through the meat grinder of commercial transmission compression.
My holiday wish is that cable companies, satellite providers, OTT providers and others would be transparent about the compression being used in their operation. It is an important factor that is easily overlooked. Until that happens, I will stare up at my live sports and streaming content with a wary eye, knowing that there is a better version available at the sacrifice of bandwidth. I'd love to have the option to experience a new tier of service that maximizes my image quality for the tradeoff of the unavailability of other content. I suspect there are quite a number of people who would pay a premium for that, too. Cable and satellite companies--are you listening?