| HIGH-DEF DISC NEWS TAGGED "CABLE PROVIDERS" | Receive High-Def Disc News via RSS |  |
Cable Television Satisfaction Up Overall
Fri Oct 09, 2009 at 11:00 AM ETTags: Cable Providers (all tags)
According to the latest study from J.D. Power and Associates, overall satisfaction with television service providers is up over last year.
The industry as a whole got a score of 632 on the 1,000 point scale that J.D. Powers uses, an increase of 23 points over last year’s results. Based on responses from around 30,000 people surveyed, the J.D. Powers and Associates poll is the go to for information on customer satisfaction.
Topping the list for the second year in a row in both the West and South regions is AT&T U-verse. AT&T was quick to cite their recent free updates to the service including U-verse Multiview and regular additions to their HD lineup. Taking the North was WOW!, and in the East, Verizon FiOS reigned supreme.
Customers subscribing to premium channels and using Video On Demand services declined about three percent each over the year. “While there has been some belt-tightening regarding most additional services,” says Frank Perazzini, director of telecommunications for J.D. Power “DVR usage has risen 22 percentage points to 40 percent this year as more households utilize this tool to shift the view time for their preferred free programming.”
Source: JD Power and Associates
See what people are saying about this story in our forums area, or check out other recent discussions.
High Definition Television – Are You Getting What You Pay For?
Mon Jul 06, 2009 at 04:00 PM ETTags: Cable Providers, Industry Trends (all tags)
Channels broadcast in HD are all the same right? Not necessarily.
According to Glen Dickenson of Broadcasting & Cable, the signal distributed by cable companies can definitely vary.
“That's because many multichannel operators have recompressed broadcasters' HD video to reduce the bandwidth needed to pass along the signal.” he writes. “For example, a cable operator might receive an 18 megabit-per-second HD stream and recompress it to 15 Mbps before passing it down the pipe.”
15 Mbps sounds like a lot, but with multicasting more and more prevalent, that space gets eaten up quickly. Stations commonly have had a main, high def feed, and substations in standard definition, but with more of these substations switching to HD, there’s less bitrate to go around. When bit rate goes down, picture suffers, and when picture suffers, consumers get mad. The difficulty is finding the acceptable point of picture quality for the average consumer.
See what people are saying about this story in our forums area, or check out other recent discussions.
» High-Def Digest home page
