said by Craiger:I was thinking could ATT decide to replace their satellite fleet with DTV's, if so would UVerse's HD quality look just like DTV's?
The picture quality has nothing to do with the satellite feeds. DTV and AT&T, as well as all TV providers receive the same satellite signals from the actual networks themselves. The question is what the providers choose to do with that signal from an encoding standpoint before they transmit it to their customers. AT&T has to take the original source and re-encode it using a different codec that results in bandwidth reduction. I believe that most providers do the same thing, however they all choose different codecs depending on how much compression they require. Some (like AT&T) compress more than others.
Additionally, most providers receive the raw video source feed from the networks directly via the network's satellite transmission at key hub locations. The providers then take those feeds and do their encoding magic to transmit to their local/regional customer base. So, AT&T is not necessarily retransmitting any of the video over satellite. They simply receive it from the network satellite and then re-encode and transmit over their ground based network to their customers.
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