Sky is becoming bad quality…

For anyone outside the UK, I’m referring to the digital TV broadcast by British Sky Broadcasting (if that is still their name).

They are stuffing far too many channels on there and as a consequence the quality is dropping. Before, you could occasionally see compression artefacts on the images, now they are everywhere. It’s especially noticeable with full screen changes when it’s dark. And once you know what it looks like it is impossible to ignore.

I have a scary theory though. Next year they are going to release SkyHD - basically Sky transmitting a High Definition signal. Now if they compress the channels the way they are now then it really won’t help since compression artefacts look worse at high resolutions. Unless the reason they are compressing channels is to fit higher bandwidth HD signals in. Or they could be doing it intentionally to exaggerate the gains from HDTV…