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March 2, 2005
Can you see me now? Good.
I had trouble trying to watch a Knicks game on a trip to my parents' place the other night, not because my favorite bunch of underachievers were losing (they beat Indiana by 11 - go figure!) but because the video was encoded so low that the image was unbearable. I could see trails wherever there was a lot of motion. Camera switches seemed surreal. And while Tricia and I both saw it, neither of my parents noticed it at all.
At first I thought it was something wonky at the head end, but then the "live-from-the-studio" halftime report looked totally fine. The bad encode was happening further upstream, perhaps before the MSG master control. Either way, it made Tricia wonder, "What's going to happen when people learn to accept lower bitrate television?"
Although I'm now sure she was speaking more of my own griping than anything else, she does have a point. Maybe, one day, the difference between the premium "NBA-League Pass" paid subscription and the free television simulcast will be that the premium signal will be encoded at a higher bitrate. Those with the right mix of money and bandwidth will be able to see TV "the way it used to be." Those without the same resources will be reduced to watching a fuzzy, artifact-laden MPEG1 stream. (I'm only speaking of the broadcast of live events here. Any other content will be (should be) time-shifted, so those with slow connections would just have to wait longer for the torrent to complete, legally or illegally.)
This adjustment of our Quality of Service expectations isn't impossible. We already did it years ago, when we traded in the quality of landline telephones for the portability of (more expensive) cell phone service. We've started making that same transition in television with the excuse that live video from a war zone is hard to come by, so we've traded in the clarity of half-a-mil worth of live satellite truck feed for the immediacy of a well "embedded" 500Kbps videophone.
(Two quick unoriginal tangents here: We accept -- no, we expect -- that war zone video to look fuzzy, and we question it's authenticity if it isn't. Also, I wonder if the advent of videophones has accelerated the inverse correlation between the thoughtfulness of a reporter's content and the faster time-to-air enabled by the technology. If there's less time to contemplate, you're gonna say really stupid sh!t.)
Will we learn to tolerate low-bitrate live sports broadcasts? I'm sure we will. My parents watch it already. And strangely, more people that I talk to seem to like the Verizon EVDO VCast stuff than I expected.
I just don't know if I'm ready to see commercials with the tagline: "Can you see it now? Good."
Posted by yatta at March 2, 2005 2:48 AM