Tata Sky has recently launched its Plus service which allows recording and replaying live TV. That is very nice sounding feature and I was almost going to upgrade my regular subscription connection to a Plus. What stopped me was that there is no information of when will HDTV be available in India. Since HDTV will anyway require a new set-top box so therefore, I hesited to upgrade to Plus and waste the money on this midway box. Im also aware that HDTV will least take least 5 years for indian release. My perspective.

Now the technology of Plus is to record TV as save in a proprietory format on its Hard drive. All that kit is part of the new set-top box. Hard disk will always have a space contrain. Therefore, to get maximum length of recording, the quality has to be low. Regular TV runs on 320×240 with 25fps. Transmissions are always analogue therefore, you won’t ever notice rough endges. Now since, Tata Sky wanted to offer Plus service with good recording duration, it certainly would reduce its transmission quality or bandwidth. Transmission of Tata Sky uses some MPEG like encoding protocol since its being transmitted on a digital connection.

What I have noticed in past about 3 months is that I see small patches similar to those you notice when watching low quality MPEG or a you-tube movie on a large resolution. These patches definately won’t be visible on a Cable TV type analougue connection. These patches destroy least 25% of the original quality of any channel that wish to see. Since there is no talk around about this topic, I assume the reduction is negligible. Nevertheless, the reduction is TV quality is not what a TV subscriber asked to pay 300Rs. a month would accept. I will be digging more about this issue and would update this web log in next few days.

Feb 26: When it launched it was just as any other TV broadcast so I could not have been a DVD Quality TV even though they keep claiming so. Now, with their reduced quality its worse than a standard MPEG VCD quality.