I’ve written on numerous occasions about watermarks, and more recently about the ABC in particular.

Today I thought I’d revisit the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and look at their HD offering – ABC HD.

First, let’s compare the watermarks. This is ABC 1.

And this is ABC HD.

Yes, John Clarke is looking away from that disaster of a watermark in disgust.

Here are those watermarks close up:

What the hell is going on with the ABC? Is that a “HD” or an “I-D”? Why is the D cut off by the green bounding box? Why is the “1″ a different font from the “HD”? Why is there a huge vertical gap between the ABC logo and the text? Why is the colour of the ABC logo odd (grey?) in the HD watermark? Why is the watermark still not over towards the right edge of the widescreen image?

Why is there a watermark at all on a non-commercial station owned and paid for by the tax payers?!

The entire industry is run by old men with no idea about technology. They don’t get typography. They have no sense of style. And they’re letting the hacks digitally damage everything we watch.

And they wonder why people are turning away from Free-To-Air television.