poor picture quality on ITV world cup matches

[5lab]

anyone else noticed a poor pq on live matches on ITV of late? i get loooads of blocking when watching through both NTL and freeview.. its not nearly so badon bbc..looks like they've maybe only paid half price for the origonal feed, and got a lower bitrate as a result..

[Funkstar]

well the BBC on Freeview will be better as they have less chanels fighting over the same bandwidth on their Multiplex. ITV probably only generate one MPEG-2 stream and send it to both NTL and whoever now own Crown Castle for their Freeview broadcast, with freeview being the lowest common denominator.

[iMc]

Yeh been getting a lot of blocking on ITV too, made me think as though IPTV was with us already and my connection was ****e...

[Mutley]

My picture's great....oh yeah, I'm on analogue...! Much better picture than digital, unless you're watching still pictures.

Putting off the time I have to move to digital for as long as possible...

[Funkstar]

I think digital is great. But then i don't watch sports (F1 occationally, if i remember and see it while flicking) and generally just watch BBC and C4 chanels.

[Bourne]

I think most matches have been poor....picture quality wise. No real detail on the pitch or in the players.

Maybe they are just trying to make a statement for us all to watch it in HD ??

[iMc]

I'm watching in analogue btw and still having the same issues.

[Borbus]

If you look at the mulitplex lineup here: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/terrestrial/mux/
You can see that the mux ITV1 is on is more contested than BBC's mux. The way freeview works is it gives more bandwidth to the streams that need it. The only exception is BBC 1 which has a fixed bandwidth. This is why the football on BBC 1 will always be better quality than ITV 1. Having Setanta and E4 on the same mux doesn't help ITV either.

But for some reason ITV 1 is really low quality on Sky and Cable too, I don't know what is going on there.