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In a battle to grab subscribers, AT&T might have gone in the wrong direction. They currently feature two HD and two SD feeds on their U-verse network, and thanks to higher MPEG-4 compression, will be able to offer three live HD streams in 2009.

Multichannel News, reporting from a conference featuring AT&T's chief technology officer, quoted Donovan as saying U-Verse plans to reduce the current 6 to 8 Megabits per second they currently use down to 5 Mbps. And they're looking to compress it even further in the future.

We have one word for that. Yuck.

Of course, Donovan said nothing about how this will effect picture quality, but it can't be good. Cable operators use MPEG-2 to deliver video, but with different compression rates, that's comparing apples to oranges.

He's also defending AT&T's decision not to follow Verizon's FiOS approach of bringing the fiber optic cable directly to the home. If the picture quality is significantly degraded, there won't be any remaining subscribers to tell if that was a good or bad decision.

What do you think - are more viewable HD streams worth the loss of picture quality? -Leslie Shapiro

Multichannel News