Cable's Dirty Little Secret

Have you bought one of those new fangled LCD HDTV's with the HDMI and RGB inputs yet? And though you may not have figured all the acronyms involved, are you at least impressed with the picture? Well, if you're on cable, you may not be as impressed as you could be.

As it turns out, cable TV and satellite companies have been compressing their high definition signals. And why would they be doing such a dastardly deed, you ask? It's the same three limitations that so often plagues the internet: Bandwidth, bandwidth, and bandwidth. There's just not enough of it to go around. And as long as the world's limited supply of bandwidth continues to controlled by a handful of unstable middle eastern countries, that's not going to change any time soon. And the environmentalists aren't helping either. Ever since that big bandwidth spill in Alaska a few years, they're more concerned with the damn polar bears than our TV reception.

For their part, the cable operators claim that the techniques they use to compress the signals do not in any way degrade the final image. Even so, it turns out some customers are taking notice.