Red button quality

[AlexandraMiller]

I pay for sky sports HD channels, yet when the red button option is available the quality of the football games on there is not even standard definition, never mind high definition. Why is this the case?

[Leejb]

Watching red button games today and the quality is absolutely terrible, never saw it this bad though sky

[newapollo · Accepted solution]

Sky provide the same red button feed to VM customers as they do for their own customers using the Sky + box, the feed is in SD.

They only supply the red button feed in HD to their own customers that have a Sky Q box.

[japitts]

The additional red-button streams are not carried in HD - never have been.

[AlexandraMiller]

I understand that the red button option is not carried in HD, however the picture is extremely blurry today. I can’t even make out the individual players on the game I’m watching. Looks nothing like the other standard definition channels from sky. Hopefully it’s just a one off! 

[nodrogd]

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@AlexandraMiller wrote:

I understand that the red button option is not carried in HD, however the picture is extremely blurry today. I can’t even make out the individual players on the game I’m watching. Looks nothing like the other standard definition channels from sky. Hopefully it’s just a one off! 

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The only hope of this improving is if Sky provide the IP driven streams used by SkyQ customers to VMs master headend. The current feed is derived from the satellite “channel” provided for Sky+ boxes. This uses one MPEG2 channel to carry all the RB streams in compressed format. The more content output the more it is compressed, so if six football matches are being covered, only 1/6 of the stream is available per match, hence the poor quality. The larger the screen you watch on the worse it gets.

[Roger_Gooner]

HD and SD have broadcast resolutions of 1080i and 576i respectively. If you have a large UHD TV, say 65" or greater, then when SD is upscaled from 576i to 2160p the result can be awful if the bitrate is poor. And one reason for poor bitrate is compression, which works by removing some data from the video, and too much compression will result in noticeably poor picture quality especially for fast moving images.