Ambient life -- I was thinking more like those big moths that get attracted to the lights on night exteriors.
As for the motion problems that Alessandro saw, I think Phil got it. It's MPEG compression artifacts. Either that or a broadcast signal problem like multipath or weak signal. That's more likely if it varies from day to day.
The magic number 19 Mbps comes from the ATSC broadcast standard adopted by the FCC. It's the max bitrate they felt they could reliably cram thru the same size (6 MHz) channel as existing analog NTSC TV. Uncompressed HD is more like 1.55 Gbps = 1550 Mbps.
On satellites, they can do something called statistical multiplexing. When they have several feeds going at once, they can divvy up the bit rate on the fly to give more to some and less to others depending on content. So your show may be given less than the average bit rate while it's sitting on a lockoff shot, and more than the average when you do a swish pan. Terrestrial broadcasters could do that, too, when they're running multiple SD channels. Some have tried squeezing one HD and one SD into the 19 Mbps, but stat mux really does well when you get into dozens of streams.
As for displays, the direct view CRT is the Achilles heel of HDTV. The big problem is that the phosphor triads or stripes and shadow mask impose yet another resampling on the image, just like looking thru a screen door. And the best of them are about 900 holes across the screen, so the thing can't possibly show you the detail that exists on HD tape. One to one pixel displays like DLP or DILA will give you a better idea of what's really there.
That being said, if you're doing something for TV, it would be wise to also look at a downconverted feed on an NTSC monitor. It's just like the mixers on the dub stage work with the good speakers, but also listen to it on the 3" cheapie speakers to make sure everything will play for the majority of the audience.
-- J.S.