When will Swisscom TV finally feed a 1080p signal to the channels that offer it? Zatoo, Teleboy and co have been able to do this for a long time. I heard that it will be fed in for the World Cup. On which channels? The difference between 720p and 1080p is clearly visible the larger the TVs are. Why have Zatoo and co been able to do this for years?
This will probably not happen for a long time or not at all.
1. Swisscom does not use any encoders that can directly transmit 1080p. It has to convert the signal into UHD on its own, i.e. the opposite of ZIP (compressing the data). This is actually an embarrassing solution for 1080p channels and will hardly be used by other channels.
2. One hopes that many channels will switch to UHD so that they don’t have to offer 1080p at all. ZDF and ARD are currently making no moves for a UHD channel.
3. The current 1080p signal from ARD and ZDF would have to be tapped via DVB-T2. Swisscom receives the signal from these two channels via satellite. It is still 720p.
It is clear that Swisscom does not give priority to communicating new channel activations and improvements. Given the facts, I wouldn’t be prepared for a foreseeable solution.
