Over the last several years 'Cable' TV had a nice advantage over their satellite competitors, primarily thanks to the limited bandwidth that is available for distribution of television programming sent over satellite.  With satellite TV service (DirecTV and Dish Network) there were only so many channels worth of capacity and the only way to deliver more channels was to squeeze the content into the limited bandwidth, similarly to overloading the freeway with more and more vehicles with each vehicle riding closer and closer to the bumper of the vehicle in front of them, as well as possibly even squeezing another lane into the same space where a lesser number of lanes had previously been (and were designed to hold).

All of that was a fine and delicate balancing act done to get more content to the consumers who were demanding that the satellite systems offer the same number of channels that the cable companies were also offering.  The satellite system customers would look at their friends with say Comcast or Cox cable and see channels offered there that they couldn't get, then start demanding that the satellite provider carry the same content or else they'd leave the satellite provider and start up service with the cable company.  A nice little competitive market place, though unfortunately that competition didn't really serve to noticably keep prices lower for anyone (the providers all used the excuse of having to add new content to justify rate increases for their customers   )

Anyway, the cable companies had a huge advantage because they had capacity for a fairly large number of channels on their systems thanks to the ability to compress digital signals and squeeze more programming into the same space where only a few analog signals would previously fit.  The compression rates that were achieved and used were more friendly to the content and less noticable to the customers (viewers) and everyone on the cable side was fairly happy.  Meanwhile, the satellite providers had always been using digital signals and had always been (or nearly always been, pretty much back to their beginnings...) using some compression to put all of the channels they could into the limited space they had available.  The math would work something like this (and this isn't the real math so please don't hold me to it): 32 transponders of space; each transponder could carry something like 3 uncompressed or lightly compressed channels of programming, so the total number of channels of video with audio that could be carried would be somewhere around 96 channels.  Take away a few channels of video and audio and use them for strictly audio programming and you'd get something along the lines of say 90 video plus audio channels and 30 audio only channels.  Those seem like decent numbers until you find customers that want another channel, or two, or ten, worth of programming to also be available.  Once you get requests for those extra channels, where do you find the room?  The answer is that you increase the compression a little more, and then a little more until you can hopefully squeeze in the channels you want to carry without noticably affecting the channels you've already been carrying.

Unfortunately for satellite customers the compression that was used kept getting ratcheted up and wasn't as unnoticable as promised by the satellite providers.  The pictures got softer, or lost detail and eventually would become noticable for digital artificating (blocking up images on the screen) or even more jagged on straight line edges and such.  For some viewers the signal was downright unacceptable, and certainly wasn't what was promised by the satellite providers.  Over time, things got even worse when high definition programming was also squeezed into the same bandwidth that was already somewhat overloaded.  In that instance one might imagine an already over crowded freeway that has a couple of very large (oversized loads) tractor trailers suddenly added to it.  As you might expect when the tractor trailers merge onto the highway the other vehicles lose space they had available before, can't see around the big rigs, and things become very noticably affected.

The cable companies customers looked over at the mini-dish satellite customers and snickered and laughed at the mini-dish customers for how they'd be stuck with 'HD-Lite', an over-compressed high definition TV signal that might be a little better than standard definition but was far from the upgrade that a full-on, uncompressed, high defintion signal delivers.  Having moved content to the digital tiers and having freed up bandwidth for the few high definition channels that were previously available, the cable companies were able to trade on that advantage and their customers received the highest quality high definition programming to watch in their homes and businesses.

Ah, the karma that can come back around and bite businesses like the cable companies in the butts   Karma is certainly turning things in favor of the satellite companies now, most especially DirecTV.  (Dish Network might be closer to them, but unfortunately a recent satellite launch failure for Dish cost them heavily {for now} in their plans to catch up with DirecTV's increased capacity.)  DirecTV has been making a major push to replace their old equipment with much more efficient equipment that is capable of receiving signals that the old equipment couldn't.  In effect the new equipment is able to add 2 or 3 levels of roadway above the old main road and squeeze all of the nice fancy sports cars into those lanes with plenty of room for them to race up and down the highway all while maintaining the old roadway underneath to continue carrying the vehicles that the majority of the customers are still getting content from.  (Dish would be doing the same thing, but again their satellite launch has hampered them for now).  So, now that more and more content is getting lit up on new high definition channels DirecTV has plenty of room to carry the new content while the cable companies aren't able to do so without making sacrifices on behalf of their customers.  Re-enter HD-Lite, this time for cable customers who now get to 'enjoy' the effects that they used to laugh at the mini-dish customers for putting up with.  What fun.

Eventually the cable companies will wind up upgrading their infrastructures and equipment so that they can catch back up with the mini-dish systems.  They're getting heavy competition from those mini-dish systems and from Verizon's FiOS offerings as well.  Perhaps the next time they'll not be so hasty to take swipes at their competitor's use of compression to deliver product because they could find themselves on the other end of the karma stick sooner or later if they do.

For more info on this issue, check out the news here: HD enthusiasts crying foul over cable TV's crunched signals