I had a look at the tv my parents own. The shows that were on SC One HD didn’t even look HD . Either that or the bitrate was low. Win Gem looked terrible too. Looked like no actual HD was playing on any of the HD channels. Even 7mate.
The SD on SC10 looked like a low quality Youtube broadcast.
As I understand SC 10 are given a seperate feed to the metro 10 feed. Much like win is given a seperate 9 feed at media hub to the one at nine metro station.
I siuppose southern cross will do things differently and will probably get HD main channek when they are ready. Of course it doesn’t happen overnight.
Are regional areas getting a lower quality HD than metro areas? . My 768p TV isn’t faulty and it is a new antenna etc , Gem looks like low quality SD on some shows. Maybe there is hardly any HD broadcasting on these multichannels or they are doing something to make them look inferior,
It’s definetely not crystal clear stunning high definition.I’d assume when the main channels return to HD they would have them looking crisp and clear.
This is because 9Gem is now only broadcasting in SD in metropolitan markets. My guess is that WIN (and NBN, at least for the time being) is upconverting the SD picture to HD - hence why the quality is less than ideal.
Roughly speaking, 7Mate and ONE are the same as metropolitan services. GEM is not the same - GEM in metro areas is now SD since the start of 9HD so anything that WIN is showing on GEM is in most cases up-converted so won’t be true HD.
What’s Nine’s metro HD picture quality like ?
Quite decent, you can definitely tell the difference between Nine SD and Nine HD. 
Also important to note that 9’s SD service already looks better than WIN’s, due to it running at a higher bitrate. Therefore, upon launching, there’s a chance that the quality of WIN HD may appear more noticably higher.
Provided that WIN don’t persist with that damn sharpening filter on WIN HD! That really reduces the picture quality IMO. 
? What is that
9Gem on NBN still looks fantastic.
Basically, an effect that’s placed on the video feed so it “looks sharper”. Many consumer grade video and photo editing applications have this sort of thing, so I’d imagine that WIN with their considerably more professional/high end broadcast equipment would have the capability to add a filter to the network programing feeds.
Personally, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it’s a very subtle tactic to encourage viewers to watch WIN-produced programing (or at least to create a perception that WIN-produced programing is of a higher quality than programing from Nine) which doesn’t have it’s picture quality reduced. 
Thanks Mark - must be getting a different feed from TCN then.
I’d assume WIN Gem looking worse now would be down to them taking some of the bits off that in order to show the placeholder channels for Life and WIN HD. WIN already wouldn’t have had particularly good HD encoders, so any reduction would have a fairly noticeable impact.
Hopefully WIN can set up WIN SD as a downconvert of WIN HD once it launches and improve the picture quality on both channels.
I’ll be interested to see how see the quality of Win HD is when it finally launches here.
I watched the footy yesty morning on GEM via WIN and it looked much better than when the NRL is on WIN. Also the GEM watermark looks very clear compared to go and WIN so who knows.
This x 1000. If they give WIN HD the Vaseline treatment I’ll be mighty pissed!
In regional Qld we will get WIN HD probably first then 7 HD I think 7 owns these stations (not sure how/why as Nine doesn’t own regional stations in Qld ? )
ABC - How would it work for the ABC ? When they switch to HD will all of Australia get it at the same time ?
I’m pretty sure that the ABC would launch it’s HD channel at the same time everywhere.
Because of the current “reach” rule.
Nine already owns their stations in the 5 mainland state capitals, plus NBN which brings them up near the 75% allowable limit.