It's about 9 days to the DTV transition. Let's check in with the over-the-air ATSC HDTV signals and see what the big networks are doing with that 27 Mbits/s channel that they've been granted by the American public. It's a priviledge, not a right!

Hmmm. The local NBC affiliate is only using 10 Mbits/s of the 27 Mbits/s channel:


Leading to spikes in the compression, resulting in a low picture quality at critical material:


That guy in the black shirt is annoying! Who's he supposed to be again?


Wow, those guys look like a bunch of hockey players. Unfortunately, hockey players and movies about hockey players are only famous in Canada.

Speaking of Canadians. The encoder used by this affiliate inserts I-frames, or key-frames, whenever it detects a scene change.


Back from Hell-eh? And ready to party. NBC broadcasting SNL in 1080i, top field first, resulting in about 30% wasted bandwidth.