Compression Artifacts in DTV

The snow is gone, the picture is sharp but something's still not quite right.

Analog television, most TV broadcast before 2007, wasn't all that great. That's why so many of us switched to cable or satellite decades ago. Since 2007 broadcasters send out a digital signal known as DTV. It was an incredible achievement but DTV images still had some picture defects that weren't present on analog television or motion picture cinema, because of current limitations of bit-rate and compression algorithms such as MPEG-4, MPEG-2 etc. This defect is sometimes referred to as "mosquito noise" or "macro-boxing".[13]

Because of the way the human visual system works, defects in an image that are localized to particular features of the image or that come and go are more perceptible than defects that are uniform and constant. However, the DTV system is designed to take advantage of other limitations of the human visual system to help mask these flaws, e.g. by allowing more compression artifacts during fast motion where the eye cannot track and resolve them as easily and, conversely, minimizing artifacts in still backgrounds that may be closely examined in a scene (since time allows).

Compression technology a decade ago wasn't as advanced as it is today. Now we can fit more shows with better quality into the same amount of electromagnetic spectrum. Enter ATSC 3.0 aka Next Gen TV and the spectrum repack. Very shortly you will be getting more channels & better picture quality from any high quality digital antenna. There are other benefits too but I’ll save that for another time. My prediction is the same as many others in this industry. More and more people will begin to realize they don’t need cable or satellite and will opt for an OTA “Over-the-Air” antenna instead.