Yes he was exagerating but by and large Setanta coverage is woeful in terms of broadcast picture quality. Though, if thats to do with having an extremely tight bandwidth from Sky, or wanting to broadcast one signal and it has to be small enough to get over freeview bandwidth I have no clue, it really is VERY poor quality though even for standard def. To be fair it wouldn't be so noticeable if I didn't watch Skysports in HD.
The thing is, setanta seem to offer HD broadcasts(i think) when they sell their coverage to the asian market, and considering the quality of some of the setanta streams you can get from said markets, it does tend to make you think Sky are screwing Setanta somehow.
But the simple fact stands, we've ALWAYS paid for english football, we're simply paying someone else. It might not cost £10, but you have to buy the whole package to get it, this was the same for English footie on sky and English footie on the BBC aswell. Nothings changed, just who you pay your money to. The fact that BBC haven't reduced their cost after losing the footie, just means you're getting screwed even more than we were before on everything else.
Its high time that BBC are forced to use advert's to pay for their upkeep and ditch the TV licence. Its been a heck of a long time since guarenteed income secured ultra high quality BBC shows, infact its been decades. In fair business their success should be based on how good they are and their viewing figures like all other tv channels. Government backing seems somehow anti competition and completely unfair, overpriced, screws us, the viewer and forces us to pay for something we might not even watch.