“Leaky Pens” and Lower Definition

What happens when a national network takes the pains to cover a remote
in HD? If your’re getting your HD from your local cable provider, it’s
kind of a joke.

Now before I go placing blame on my cable provider, when it comes to
digital signals, the home viewer (even one who has worked in the
business) has a hard time figuring out who’s to blame. In the days of
plain old analog, if the reception sucked, it was probably the fault of
the cable company – because usually if the problem was at the station,
they would put up a "Technical Dificulties" super. In the wonderful
world of MPEG-2, Stat-Mux, 8-VSB and 64-QAM it’s almost impossible for
the viewer at home to divine where the bits have fallen out of the
bucket.

The show that sparked this diatribe was my viewing of "Capitol
Fourth", the concert and fireworks display carried locally (in HD)
where I live by WNET and Cablevision. The first thing I noticed was that
whenever there was a dissolve to or from a taped piece of ‘b-roll’, the
dissolve looked awful. "Not enough bits being allocated", I thought. But
I knew that there were "leaky pens"* in use when, during Jason
Alexander‘s solo number, the audio went to the digital equivalent of
south. (It was fine on the SD ‘cast.) There were some obviously some
efforts by some engineer somewhere to locate the correct "leaky pen" as
the picture took some breif hits, then a longer disturbance and lo and
behold the picture and sound returned together !

Now before I let cable companies off hook altogether, let me just
mention my one and only viewing of the Time-Warner Manhattan HD service.
First I watched (or more correctly, attempted to watch) Discovery HD.
Now this is an HD network that Cablevision does not offer on its HD
tier. It is also a network that is anal about the quality of submitted
materials. (Editing in the compressed domain is not permitted except in
narrow and hard fought-for exceptions.) The bit rate on this channel was
so low, that except for the fact the picture was 16×9, I thought I was
watching the old analog feed out of Group W in Stamford. Then I changed
their to WABC-DT feed to watch some ‘Good Morning America’, which I get
at home – so I have some basis of comparison. The bit rate there was set
too low as well. If I had TW’s HD service I’d ask for my money back!

And then there was NBC’s SD broadcast of Macy*s fireworks… very
disapointing after last year’s HD ‘cast. Perhaps a topic for it’s own
Blog entry ?

* "Leaky pens" is a quote from former ABC President of Broadcast
Engineering and Operations Julie Barnathan, referring to digital time
base correctors that did not maintain the proper vertical blanking.