Years ago when deciding to cut the cord, I had to convince my roommate that an OTA DTV antenna would provide a better image. We had clear line of sight to the broadcast towers, so I knew it was a no brainer, but I'm in the video side of things, and he's not. This makes him a great analog for the vast majority of viewers. I set the inputs on the TV to the same channel for the Comcast cable box and the OTA antenna, and then A/B tested the inputs for him. Even he could see how bad the image from cable came. Their push-a-button-get-a-prize style one set of encoding settings for all content will always mean their low bit rates look bad.
My favorite cable box sports example was a PGA tournament was showing a golfer putting on the green. The shot was an extremely tight close up of the ball sitting there as the golfer addressed the ball. All of the dimples in the ball were clear, and every blade of grass was visible until the golfer swung and made contact with the ball. As the camera panned to follow, the ball went to this white roundish shape with no detail and the grass went to this blurry green smear again with no detail. As soon as the ball went into the cup and the camera stopped moving, at least one GOP later the grass snapped into full detail again.
Their predictive model is tuned for low motion static content because that's what 90%+ of their content is. Even something like ESPN is now primarily talking heads of people talking about sports rather than being sports. Any sports show in replay and not live so who cares? Looking back at crappy SD tape captures, it's obvious that anything was better than nothing. Much like YouTube. People just want something, doesn't have to be amazing. If it looks like Picasso instead of Monet, they don't care as long as their minds don't have to think
And to think the US government gave anyone that wanted one a free DTV antenna. By that point, pretty much nobody used a terrestrial antenna any more, so a very few number of people took them up on the offer. I can only imagine cable companies being very please with that.
Also, the signal was meant to have even more bandwidth. When the broadcasters decided to bring out the fractional channels, it didn't exactly fit the idea that Congress had when allocating the frequencies. Yet another example of how Congress can be behind the times in pretty much everything.
When we bought our place we put a rooftop mounted antenna, and Distribution Amp (essentially a zero loss splitter), and then pulled RG-6 Quad Shield to each room.
My favorite cable box sports example was a PGA tournament was showing a golfer putting on the green. The shot was an extremely tight close up of the ball sitting there as the golfer addressed the ball. All of the dimples in the ball were clear, and every blade of grass was visible until the golfer swung and made contact with the ball. As the camera panned to follow, the ball went to this white roundish shape with no detail and the grass went to this blurry green smear again with no detail. As soon as the ball went into the cup and the camera stopped moving, at least one GOP later the grass snapped into full detail again.
Their predictive model is tuned for low motion static content because that's what 90%+ of their content is. Even something like ESPN is now primarily talking heads of people talking about sports rather than being sports. Any sports show in replay and not live so who cares? Looking back at crappy SD tape captures, it's obvious that anything was better than nothing. Much like YouTube. People just want something, doesn't have to be amazing. If it looks like Picasso instead of Monet, they don't care as long as their minds don't have to think