Quality of same Programme differs between BBC iPlayer & UKTV Play

[Jak14140]

Hello all,

I have a question that I would like to put to you here in the hope that I may find some answers.

In the UK there is a popular TV Soap Opera called “EastEnders” that belongs to BBC, and there is another service that shows the repeats called “UKTV”.

On BBC iPlayer, the show looks sharp and crisp (despite it being an SD show), yet if I watch the same episode via UKTV Play (now re-branded “U”), it is less sharp with loss of detail, and the picture is also cropped.

My question is why this would be? Why would the episodes look good on iPlayer but just average on U?

[SB47x]

They're different services with different servers. The stuff on U's servers is obviously lower resolution/bitrate than the stuff you get from iPlayer, at least for this particular show.

[Jak14140]

Well interestingly, when I compare one of the same episodes from both services, the BBC iPlayer one is in 960x540, and the other one from the other service is 1024x576. Yet the bitrate of the iPlayer version is lower than the UKTV version...so why is it then that the quality is worse on the UKTV one?

[ListyDoM]

Well interestingly, when I compare one of the same episodes from both services, the BBC iPlayer one is in 960x540, and the other one from the other service is 1024x576. Yet the bitrate of the iPlayer version is lower than the UKTV version...so why is it then that the quality is worse on the UKTV one?

BBC vs UKTV