re: When will cable companies and DirecTV sign on for the SEC Network?

Do you run 1080i HD to a 37inch TV or bigger? Also where you live to you have fiber running to your house. It has been stated that ATT Uverse in texas has went all fiber to the houses. If you have this service then its really good. However, if you have coax cable coming in the house then you will be experiencing the degraded pixelated signal.

Switch to cable or satellite. AT&T simply has the worst HD picture in the business, and pixellation is very common.

To give you an idea:

U-Verse compresses their HD channels to a bitrate of 5.6 Mbps.

DirecTV fits 5 HD stations on a 38 Mbps transponder, wich is about 7.5 to 8 Mbps per channel. I do believe however that this is flexible. Some stations (e.g. HGTV, Food Network) do a lot of stretch-o-vision programming, which doesn't take that much bandwidth, leaving the other stations on that transponder with more bandwidth. 7 Mbps would be the bare minimum.

Both use MPEG4 for their compression, but a 7.5 Mbps MPEG4 compressed stream is better in quality then 5.6 Mbps MPEG4.

Dish Network uses similar compression as DirecTV (MPEG4). Cable still mostly use MPEG2, but their bitrate is usually somewhere between 12 and 18 Mbps, depending on which channels, what providers, etc. (A Time Warner tech once told me that their HD stations are roughly 16 Mbps, but he was biased of course).

Of course MPEG2 requires a lot more bandwidth then MPEG4, so the quality is not necessarily better then U-Verse, but the general consensus among users is that the quality totem-pole is roughly as such:

1: Satellite DBS Systems such as Dish Network and DirecTV.
2: FIOS Verizon.
3: Cable providers.
4: AT&T U-Verse.

Of course there are some major fluctuations with cable networks. Some are very close or equal to DBS or FIOS because of new, upgraded technologies. (Comcast XFinity seems to be pretty good from what I hear), where others, most often in somewhat smaller communities, are barely any better then AT&T's U-verse.

TS Link from customers

Thats cool for you. However, not all locations are the same. There are definately factors to contribute. How big your tv is. The pixelation really shows itself at 37inch and higher. Also it depends on how you are watching too. If you are watch a true 1080i/720p broadcast it typically shows up as well. I don't have a dog in the fight just want to make people aware of what kind of service it is. My inlaws pay 200+ a month for the tv/internet service through uverse. They are not on any promotions as they have expired. I have direct tv right now but in Sept I will be cancelling it and unplugging from cable tv all together. I will find the sporting events on ESPN 3 or find another online service that will stream them. Its not too difficult. If they have a blackout in my area I will run Hotspot shield which will mask my ip to a ip in Arizona. So I will essentially bypass the blackouts by using that service.