Right, the standard broadcast “HDTV” signal is still quite compressed, but I find that the Over-The-Air signal I can receive is usually superior to the same programming coming through my cable or satellite system. It seems the cable and satellite providers compress the signals even further, to get more content through their “wires”.
Which is what I’m sure the author intended to say.
Satellite DTV especially is notorious for not only lowering bitrates of HD programs, they also lower resolution from the standard 1920x1080 to as low as 1280x1080.
They also use MPEG4 for all of their HD compression, so direct bitrate comparisons vs. OTA HD is not possible (OTA uses the older and less efficient MPEG2 compression standard.)
Dish and DirecTV even lower the resolution of many of their SD channels from 720x480 to as low as 480x480 to save bits.