Comment by Tijdreiziger

5 years ago

YouTube's bitrates are atrocious. I don't understand why they can't at least offer a higher bitrate to their paying Premium customers.

> Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.

According to Wikipedia, a DVB-C stream can be between 6-65 Mb/s [1], certainly higher than YouTube's 3-9 Mb/s (assuming 1080p video). The situation for resolutions above 1080p seems to be a bit better [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-C

[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-youtube-...

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Tijdreiziger

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bscphil  5 years ago

I'm not sure about Europe, but in the US it's very rare to see bitrates even a large fraction of that. (I don't see a minimum bitrate on the ATSC Wikipedia page, and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that it's often lower than 6 Mbps.) Worse still, in a bunch of places the cable companies still deliver MPEG-2 video, which is going to look pretty atrocious at anything other than an extremely high bitrate. It's a big disadvantage compared to Youtube. Plus a whole bunch of programs are in 60 fps, which need a higher bitrate anyway.

I plugged in my cable box for the first time in months to watch the Super Bowl, and was shocked at how terrible the video was. I could see obvious artifacts without glasses on, and I can't even tell 720p from 1080p at that distance. Some of my relatives have those MPEG-2 channels, and I remember them being significantly worse.

Not trying to say that cable TV can never be better than Youtube's quality, of course, just trying to give a general impression of my experience with various American cable companies.