Green grass and camera pans are what break a stream

Encoders fail on exactly the shots that sport needs most, which is why live pictures look worse than a film at half the bitrate.

A drama series at a modest bitrate looks fine. A football match at twice that bitrate turns to mush the moment the camera swings. There is a reason, and it is not that broadcasters are being cheap, though sometimes they are.

Video compression works by describing what changed between one frame and the next. A shot of two people talking in a room changes very little, so almost nothing has to be transmitted and the picture stays sharp. A wide shot of a pitch, panning, contains motion in every part of the frame at once, and the encoder must describe the whole picture again and again. Grass makes it worse, because grass is fine detail with no structure the compressor can predict, which is the worst possible input for an algorithm built on prediction.

Add a crowd. Thousands of small moving objects, confetti, flags, camera flashes, all of it unpredictable. When people say a stream fell apart at a corner, that is usually what happened. The encoder ran out of budget at the exact moment the shot got complicated, which is always the moment something is happening.

This is why the wide camera has quietly lost ground to tight shots that compress beautifully and show you nothing about shape or space. I do not think anybody decided this. It is an emergent preference, produced by the fact that the tight shot looks better on the platform where most people now watch, and the director sees the same monitor as everybody else.

Some of it is fixable. Encoding a sports feed with settings tuned for motion instead of general purpose settings makes a large difference, and so does a variable bitrate that is allowed to spike hard for six seconds rather than holding a flat ceiling. Both cost money in delivery, and delivery is billed by volume.

What I object to is the framing. Picture quality gets sold as a resolution number on a package tier, and resolution is close to irrelevant here. A high resolution stream starved of bitrate during a fast pan is worse than a lower resolution one with room to breathe, and every viewer has seen this and been told they are imagining it.