A television commercial that the production company produced in very high quality, is heavily compressed for digital delivery (as required by broadcast and cable stations), likely transcoded to conform to stations’ servers, compressed again by the cable company feed, then further distorted when it hits a flat screen TV. Each step degrading the quality of the commercial. Finally the consumer views this degraded commercial against national feed high definition programming that has not been forced to endure so much heavy compression. Not a good, nor fair comparison. Continue reading →

Back to our journey… 6) The production company compresses the digital file per the specifications of DGFastChannel and/or Cox Spot Express and uploads the heavily compressed file into DGFastChannel’s upload system and/or into Cox Spot Express spot upload system. 7) … Continue reading →

Television commercials that are placed and delivered at the nation level can be produced, delivered, and broadcast in high definition, because they come down the national feed. For example, when a national Budweiser spot comes on TV, it may very … Continue reading →

With the advent of flat screen televisions and high definition our staff has been excited about being able to produce really great looking television spots. Unfortunately the reality is the quality of a locally inserted television commercial has ironically suffered significant on-air quality degradation, even while TV stations tout “digital” and “high definition”. My company, Earworks Media, produces television commercials. This issue affects us and our clients directly, so we set out to find out why the on-air quality of spots has degraded and to present it in a non-technical way. So regardless of what production company produced your television commercial, here’s the journey of your commercial from start to finish, and what happens to it along the way. Continue reading →