ITV on SKY vs ITV on Freeview

[Schrodinger56]

I've just had to switch over from watching the footie on ITV through SKY to watching it through Freeview as through SKY the quality of the picture is dreadful. The players are just blurry blobs and even the picture looked blocky. Compared to the quality of the other mainline channels through SKY ITV seems very bad. Is there any reason for this?

Ta

[skypaulusplus]

well im watching it on freeview via wiindows 7 and its got me fooled, it looks hd

GOAL!

[Schrodinger56]

well im watching it on freeview via wiindows 7 and its got me fooled, it looks hd

GOAL!

Windows 7 is it released?

[skypaulusplus]

22nd oct
im using the release candidate

last time i watche itv sky footie it was appauling

[Schrodinger56]

I've pre-ordered mine from Amazon for £49.99 to put on one of my PCs, I've stuck Apple's Snow Leopard on my iMac so it'll be interesting to compare them both when Windows 7 arrives.

[Old_nick]

I've just had to switch over from watching the footie on ITV through SKY to watching it through Freeview as through SKY the quality of the picture is dreadful. The players are just blurry blobs and even the picture looked blocky. Compared to the quality of the other mainline channels through SKY ITV seems very bad. Is there any reason for this?

Ta

A lot depends on which region you're in. ITV have to rent transponder space for each of the regions they transmit, and you get the one that matches your region, based on your Sky card. I get the feeling that ITV spend more on the bigger regions, so if you happen to live in East Anglia or Scotland, where the population density is lower (fewer people to complain), you will get a worse quality picture. At the moment ITV are struggling for survival, so they are cutting costs wherever they can.

[Kenedin]

Football pq on ITV has always been poor. Nomatter which region you live in. ITV's bitrates are pretty much the same for all regions( circa 3.0>3.4Mbps) except, curiously, ITV W Country ( currently over 6Mbps since last May ). Needless to say I have added ITV W Country to my Other Channels. Check out :

LinowSat

[dms05]

ITV have chosen, for satellite, to transmit most ITV regions at a very low picture quality. On my 42" TV it looks as bad as channels from Nigeria. However they have chosen to broadcast a better quality picture on Freeview. I've asked ITV why and they never answer.

I watched the Eng v Slo game on ITV HD which is better than the normal ITV picture (it couldn't be worse) but isn't anywhere near as good as Sky Sports HD. Even during the tremendous rain storms in Glasgow the Sky HD picture of Sco v Mac was superior to the ITV HD picture in perfect conditions at Wembley.

Recently ITV HD has been broadcast at 960*1080 (that's half the horizontal definition of full HD at 1920*1080) but they reverted to 1440*1080 for this match. So don't expect too much from ITV as they are already cannibalising before they even have a full channel operating.