I disagree. To be honest Aereo's service was about as reliable as your average antenna is (read: not reliable.) To me it felt like I was renting a really large extension cord for a cable. One that I need because I live in a basement apartment and even with 60 dollar antennas I get spotty reception at best. Aereo was more consistent but the quality was that of what you would expect from an antenna. It didn't feel like someone was recording 1080p HD quality from cable and then streaming it to me. Cable is not just crummy antenna quality that is then piped to the home. They get high quality from the channels.
Broadcast DTV usually looks better on an antenna than on cable.
I recently gave a pair of rabbit ears to my mother-in-law and we were amazed at how much better the picture quality was. She's lucky, howver, to live about a mile or two from the sticks. Most people need a better antenna.
Cable HDTV is often heavily compressed so they can fit hundreds of junky channels into a limited pipe. Particularly for sports where there is fast motion and fine detail, the difference is night and day.
So, I just spent the last two months working out the details of how to put a digital cable channel on a hotel cable headend. I have some clarification of what may be going on here.
Cable headends tend not to have very much compression equipment, sometimes they have stuff used for feeds local to the headend, but usually the compression happens at the originating facility. For something like CNN, this is at their studio. The signal with that original compression is encrypted, uplinked to the satellite and then received off the satellite by receivers at the headend. It comes out of that receiver as a compressed digital signal called ASI, which is MPEG2 compressed video over SDI. It is then typically fed into a demultiplexer/multiplexer that will combine or separate it into different streams and then it is fed into a QAM modulator. For ATSC the same is fed into a 8vsb modulator (or something like that). For encrypted systems it is fed into a encryption unit before being fed into the QAM modulator. The key here is that each video stream is not recompressed even when it is remultiplexed.
The issue may be that of signal strengths and associated error rates and how that is reflected in encrypted streams. Typically encryption cases degradation to be reflected poorly in the signal compared to unencrypted signals.
I get better quality video from my antenna than through cable. In my experience the tv station uses less compression than the cable company. And since the switch to digital OTA video the picture has been rock solid.
I've had this experience in both Columbus, OH and Phoenix, AZ.
