James Delahunty
5 Apr 2008 21:15
Verizon is citing a widely publicized article in which an HDTV enthusiast on the AVS Forum experimented with Verizon's FiOS and Comcast's HD offerings to defend a potentially misleading advertisement claim. The testing found that Comcast's re-compressing of HD video (to make way for more channels) had very undesirable results for customers. The quality comparison showed that Comcast quality was pale in comparison to FiOS in recordings taken of the same program, on the channels at the same time.
Sure, Verizon has every right to smile and tout about the results, but an advertisement campaign which claims that FiOS TV offers "pure uncompressed High Definition," could be considered as badly misleading. While FiOS does not re compress its video content, the content providers do compress it before providing it to cable companies.
"It's true that content owners compress their video before sending it to video service providers," Verizon media relations director Bobbi Henson said in an e-mailed statement. "But we forward the signal to our customers the way that we receive it."